CLIVE BARKER

THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

The First Book of the Art

Copyright

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by William Collins & Sons 1989

Copyright © Clive Barker 1989

Clive Barker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006179085

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007382958

Version: 2016-12-29

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

‘In part a tale of terrors, rooted in recognisable suburbia, and in part a mythical saga, romping through various layers of consciousness. You never know quite where you stand or whether at key moments you are intended to feel cosmically enlightened or just palpably spooked. It is often claimed for horror that it draws on the primal in our responses but, as moments like this show, the best stories can owe their force to something nearer the contemporary surface.’

Independent

‘A mixture of sex, Armageddon and Hollywood … ingenious and compelling.’

Daily Express

‘A social visionary. He crafts intricately designed hellscapes … a writer unbound by the traditional restrictions of the horror genre. Barker’s vision is at once startling and seductive. A finely tuned, dark allegory and a painful parody of our most cherished religious longings. Barker has initiated an exciting fictional exploration of the ramifications of our mythologies. He is at his best here … a true master at work.’

Times Picayune, New Orleans

‘This enthralling fable … the headlong progress of Randolph Jaffe from lost-letter sorter to evil master of unreality pulls the reader along in its ghost-ridden slipstream.’

Manchester Evening News

‘Trying to describe Clive Barker’s writing is like trying to nail smoke to a wall. Almost singlehandedly, he’s reshaping horror stories into something quite different – mystic fables for the modem age. An astonishing book, combining leaps of the imagination with Zen mysticism and psychology.’

Cleo, Sydney

‘The best thing he has ever written … pure narrative simplicity… what wonders are in store as he develops his themes?’

Fear

‘He has forged a singular style of “fantastical” fiction, blending bizarre eroticism and gruesome horror into wild tales of supernatural exploration … emphasizes ideas over gore with provocative and apocalyptic vision … dazzling skill.’

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

‘Acute and fluent, Barker’s novel is fantasy, or horror, or science-fantasy, or everything together.’

Observer

‘The Great and Secret Show is a fable for our times. A marvelously complex work, intricately planned: a myriad of subplots all come together in a final crescendo. There is an Everyman quality about the novel.’

Rocky Mountain News

‘Memorable characters, careening, converging plots, a precise, ironic, measured style … Barker’s a showman.’

Chicago Tribune

‘Clive Barker, polymath among goremeisters … the novel has moments of visionary nastiness, and Barker has certainly learned how to develop and maintain a coherent narrative structure over the extended length of a fantasy blockbuster.’

Q

‘Gripping, ambitious, a very imaginative work …’

Kent Evening Post

‘Barker has evolved into something more than just another horror writer … a never-ending fantasy joyride.’

Sacramento Union

‘Fantastic stuff … Barker writes extremely well.’

Evening Standard

Memory, prophecy and fantasy – the past, the future and the dreaming moment between – are all one country, living one immortal day.

To know that is Wisdom.

To use it is the Art.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

PART ONE The Messenger

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

PART TWO The League of Virgins

I

II

III

PART THREE Free Spirits

I

II

III

IV

V

PART FOUR Primal Scenes

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

PART FIVE Slaves and Lovers

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

PART SIX In Secrets, Most Revealed

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

PART SEVEN Souls at Zero

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also By Clive Barker

About the Publisher

PART ONE

I

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. Sooner started, sooner I can find you more.’

Randolph stepped into the room. It was large, painted the same bilious yellow and battleship grey 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’ US Mail 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 centre,’ Homer countered. ‘But we still end up with all the crap. And it’s all got to get sorted. By hand. 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 US Mail 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 –’ 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 walkabout. 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 on 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 copperplate. 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 centre of the USA, but as far as the Post Office was concerned, it may as well have been.

The lines of communication crossed, and re-crossed, 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 – sitting at his crossroads – 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, résumés, 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 clichés; 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 unstateable.

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-magick 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 into 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 – in no particular order – 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 amongst the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap jewellery 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 –’

‘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 everything. 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 jewellery, 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 thousand upon thousand 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 formulae, 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 meanwhile 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 – but especially the boor-slob Homer – 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, whose faces he’d one day get to see. He’d also keep the twenty or 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 clocked off 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 naif any longer. Nor – now it came to it – 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 amongst 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 centre 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 –’

‘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, ’til 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 hump 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 goodbye to all that. After this – Homer dead, the letters burnt – 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 practise.

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 – paper, fabric, flesh – 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 retreated 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 – eradicating every trace of Randolph Ernest Jaffe – that he regretted doing what he’d done. Not the burning – that had been altogether wise – 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 – 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 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.

II

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 savour 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 was 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 over 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 – which was not the first, nor would be the last – 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 – the ground beneath him, the darkening sky above his head – 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 – alive, again; Randolph Ernest Jaffe again – 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.

III

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 slap, his pores enlarged and greasy, his hair, what was left of it, long and grey. 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 –’

‘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 –’

‘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 –’

‘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 – 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 – all of this put Jaffe in mind 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 – how did you say it? – 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, ‘– 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 broken, and re-set 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 honour 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 turkey 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 smelt 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 – 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 pretence.

‘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 Kentucky, 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 resistible, and the further 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 discover 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 endeavour. 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.

IV

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 – until his recent fall from grace – one of the most lauded and revolutionary minds in the field of evolutionary studies; the head of several research programmes 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. Mescalin 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 – of alchemists and magicians – 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 Misión de Santa Catrina where he’d laboured 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 labours most of the world would have judged ungodly than an abandoned Jesuit Mission, but then from the outset this endeavour 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 –’ 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 clung, 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 upon 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 would be able to make any sense of them. It was only his obsessiveness that made him want to wipe the slate completely clean, and shouldn’t he know better, when that very obsessiveness had been one of the qualities that had brought this waste 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 wilfully 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 phials 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 labours.

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 phials 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 and 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 mescalin 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. Raul 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 – indeed his only hope – 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 – in the myriad configurations of certain marine animals – that he’d first observed the urge things had to become something other than themselves. Clues to which the three phials 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 phials 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 – even a primitive propulsion, it seemed; it was climbing the walls of the phials – 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 phials, 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 phials 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.

V

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 labouring 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 mescalin 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 gurus 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, despatching supplies (starfish, sea urchins; mescalin; 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 ardour 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 – coaxed, bullied or seduced from academics who’d given him what he asked for just to get Jaffe’s eyes off them – 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 favourite room, the cell he’d once (high on mescalin) 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 greying hair (his only concession to vanity), was in place. Even his posture – hands at his lap, the body sagging – 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 – the walls, the window, even the chair on which Fletcher sat – 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 –’

‘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 off 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 – grey, white and red – 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 ’til 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 … Kissoon 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 –’

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 phials left in the rack, their contents boiling up against the glass.

‘Beautiful,’ Jaffe said, and stepped towards them, the Nuncio leaping up in the phials 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 phials. 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 – its calm, its safety – 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 – when they’d gone – 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 on day, and Christmases coming on Christmases, and only age to mark them. Never getting closer to understanding why he’d been made – 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 Misión 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 endeavour. 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 half way 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 ball-bearings, came sweating from it. ‘You see?’ he said, ‘I’m an Artist.’

‘Not ’til 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 – Heaven or Hell – 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 colour 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 – walls which had been built to survive until the end of faith – 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 centre 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.

VI

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 Omaha Post Office he would have discovered countless letters flying back and forth, filled with theories and suppositions. None, however – even from correspondents who’d known in some oblique fashion about the Shoal and the Art – 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 Misión 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 counterfeits, 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 south-west. 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 phial 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-south-west over Fresno, and towards Bakersfield they travelled, until – on Friday, July 27th, 1971, their powers so depleted they could no longer keep themselves aloft – 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.

PART TWO

I
i

The girls went down to the water twice. The first time was the day after the rain-storm that had broken over Ventura County, shedding more water on the small town of Palomo Grove in a single night than its inhabitants might have reasonably expected in a year. The downpour, however monsoonal, had not mellowed the heat. With what little wind there was coming off the desert, the town baked in the high nineties. Children who’d exhausted themselves playing in the heat through the morning wailed away the afternoon indoors. Dogs cursed their coats; birds declined to make music. Old folks took to their beds. Adulterers did the same, dressed in sweat. Those unfortunates with tasks to perform that couldn’t be delayed until evening, when (God willing) the temperature dropped, went about their labours with their eyes to the shimmering sidewalks, every step a trial, every breath sticky in their lungs.

But the four girls were used to heat; it was at their age the condition of the blood. Between them, they had seventy years’ life on the planet, though when Arleen turned nineteen the following Tuesday, it would be seventy-one. Today she felt her age; that vital few months that separated her from her closest friend, Joyce, and even further from Carolyn and Trudi, whose mere seventeen was an age away for a mature woman like herself. She had much to tell on the subject of experience that day, as they sauntered through the empty streets of Palomo Grove. It was good to be out on a day like this, without being ogled by the men in the town – they knew them all by name – whose wives had taken to sleeping in the spare room; or their sexual banter being overheard by one of their mothers’ friends. They wandered, like Amazons in shorts, through a town taken by some invisible fire which blistered the air and turned brick into mirage but did not kill. It merely laid the inhabitants stricken beside their open fridges.

‘Is it love?’ Joyce asked Arleen.

The older girl had a swift answer.

‘Hell no,’ she said. ‘You are so dumb sometimes.’

‘I just thought … with you talking about him that way.’

‘What do you mean: that way?’

‘Talking about his eyes and stuff.’

‘Randy’s got nice eyes,’ Arleen conceded. ‘But so’s Marty, and Jim, and Adam –’

‘Oh stop,’ said Trudi, with more than a trace of irritation. ‘You’re such a slut.’

‘I am not.’

‘So stop it with the names. We all know that boys like you. And we all know why.’

Arleen threw her a look which went unread given that all but Carolyn were wearing sun-glasses. They walked on a few yards in silence.

‘Anyone want a Coke?’ Carolyn said. ‘Or ice-cream?’ They’d come to the bottom of the hill. The Mall was ahead, its air-conditioned stores tempting.

‘Sure,’ said Trudi, ‘I’ll come with you.’ She turned to Arleen. ‘You want something?’

‘Nope.’

‘Are you sulking?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good,’ said Trudi. ‘’Cause it’s too hot to argue.’ The two girls headed into Marvin’s Food and Drug, leaving Arleen and Joyce on the street corner.

‘I’m sorry …,’ Joyce said.

‘What about?’

‘Asking you about Randy. I thought maybe you … you know … maybe it was serious.’

‘There’s no one in the Grove that’s worth two cents,’ Arleen murmured. ‘I can’t wait to get out.’

‘Where will you go? Los Angeles?’

Arleen pulled her sun-glasses down her nose and peered at Joyce.

‘Why would I want to do that?’ she said. ‘I’ve got more sense than to join the line there. No. I’m going to New York. It’s better to study there. Then work on Broadway. If they want me they can come and get me.’

‘Who can?’

‘Joyce,’ Arleen said, mock-exasperated. ‘Hollywood.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Hollywood.’

She nodded appreciatively at the completeness of Arleen’s plan. She had nothing in her own head anywhere near so coherent. But it was easy for Arleen. She was California Beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed and the envied possessor of a smile that brought the opposite sex to their knees. If that weren’t advantage enough she had a mother who’d been an actress, and already treated her daughter like a Star.

Joyce had no such blessings. No mother to pave the way, no glamour to get her through the bad times. She couldn’t even drink a Coke without coming out in a rash. Sensitive skin, Doctor Briskman kept saying, you’ll grow out of it. But the promised transformation was like the end of the world that the Reverend talked about on a Sunday; delayed and delayed. With my luck, Joyce thought, the day I lose my zits and get my tits is the day the Reverend’s right. I’ll wake up perfect, open the curtains, and the Grove will be gone. I’ll never get to kiss Randy Krentzman.

There, of course, lay the real reason behind her close questioning of Arleen. Randy was in Joyce’s every thought, or every other, though she’d only met him three times and spoken to him twice. She’d been with Arleen during the first encounter, and Randy had scarcely looked her way when she was introduced, so she’d said nothing. The second occasion she’d not had any competition, but her friendly hello had been greeted with an off-hand: ‘Who are you?’ She’d persisted; reminded him; even told him where she lived. On the third meeting (‘Hello again,’ she’d said. ‘Do I know you?’ he’d replied), she’d recited all her personal details shamelessly; even asked him, in a sudden rush of optimism, if he was a Mormon. That, she’d later decided, had been a tactical error. Next time she’d use Arleen’s approach, and treat the boy as though his presence was barely endurable; never look at him; only smile if it was absolutely necessary. Then, when you were about to saunter away look straight into his eyes, and purr something vaguely dirty. The law of mixed messages. It worked for Arleen, why not for her? And now that the great beauty had publicly announced her indifference to Joyce’s idol she had some sliver of hope. If Arleen had been seriously interested in Randy’s affections then Joyce might have gone straight round to the Reverend Meuse and asked him if he could hurry the Apocalypse up a little.

She took off her glasses and squinted up at the white hot sky, vaguely wondering if it was already on its way. The day was strange.

‘Shouldn’t do that,’ Carolyn said, emerging from Marvin’s Food and Drug with Trudi following, ‘the sun’ll burn out your eyes.’

‘It will not.’

‘It will so,’ Carolyn, ever the source of unwanted information, replied, ‘your retina’s a lens. Like in a camera. It focuses –’

‘All right,’ Joyce said, returning her gaze to solid ground. ‘I believe you.’ Colours cavorted behind her eyes for a few moments, disorienting her.

‘Where now?’ said Trudi.

‘I’m going back home,’ Arleen said. ‘I’m tired.’

‘I’m not,’ Trudi said brightly. ‘I’m not going home, either. It’s boring.’

‘Well it’s no use standing in the middle of the Mall,’ Carolyn said. ‘That’s as boring as being at home. And we’ll cook in the sun.’

She looked roasted already. The heaviest of the four by twenty pounds or more, and a red-head, the combination of her weight, and skin that never tanned, should have driven her indoors. But she seemed indifferent to the discomfort, as she was to every other physical stimulus but that of taste. The previous November the entire Hotchkiss family had been involved in a freeway pile-up. Carolyn had crawled free of the wreckage, slightly concussed, and had subsequently been found by the police some way down the freeway, with half-chewed Hershey bars in both hands. There was more chocolate on her face than blood, and she’d screamed blue murder – or so rumour went – when one of the cops attempted to dissuade her from her snack. Only later was it discovered that she’d sustained half a dozen cracked ribs.

‘So where?’ said Trudi, returning to the burning issue of the day. ‘In this heat: where?’

‘We’ll just walk,’ said Joyce. ‘Maybe down to the woods. It’ll be cooler there.’ She glanced at Arleen. ‘Are you coming?’

Arleen made her companions hang on her silence for ten seconds. Finally she agreed.

‘Nowhere better to go,’ she said.

ii

Most towns, however small, make themselves after the pattern of a city. That is, they divide. White from black, straight from gay, wealthy from less wealthy, less wealthy from poor. Palomo Grove, the population of which was in that year, 1971, a mere one thousand two hundred, was no exception. Built on the flanks of a gently sloping hillside, the town had been designed as an embodiment of democratic principles, in which every occupant was intended to have equal access to the centre of power in the town, the Mall. It lay at the bottom of Sunrise Hill, known simply as the Hill, with four villages – Stillbrook, Deerdell, Laureltree and Windbluff – radiating from its hub, their feed thoroughfares aligned with the compass points. But that was as far as the planners’ idealism went. Thereafter the subtle differences in the geography of the villages made each quite different in character. Windbluff, which lay on the south-west flank of the hill, commanded the best views, and its properties the highest prices. The top third of the Hill was dominated by half a dozen grand residences, their roofs barely visible behind lush foliage. On the lower slopes of this Olympus were the Five Crescents, streets bowed upon themselves, which were – if you couldn’t afford a house at the very top – the next most desirable places to live.

By contrast, Deerdell. Built on flat ground, and flanked on two sides by undeveloped woodland, this quadrant of the Grove had rapidly gone down-market. Here the houses lacked pools and needed paint. For some, the locale was a hip retreat. There were, even in 1971, a few artists living in Deerdell; that community would steadily grow. But if there was anywhere in the Grove where people went in fear for their automobiles’ paintwork, it was here.

Between these two extremes, socially and geographically, lay Stillbrook and Laureltree, the latter thought marginally more up-market because several of its streets were built on the second flank of the Hill, their scale and their prices less modest with every bend the streets took as they climbed.

None of the quartet were residents of Deerdell. Arleen lived on Emerson, the second highest of the Crescents, Joyce and Carolyn within a block of each other on Steeple Chase Drive in Stillbrook Village, and Trudi in Laureltree. So there was a certain adventure in treading the streets of the East Grove, where their parents had seldom, if ever, ventured. Even if they had strayed down here, they’d certainly never gone where the girls now went: into the woods.

‘It’s no cooler,’ Arleen complained when they’d been wandering a few minutes. ‘In fact, it’s worse.’

She was right. Though the foliage kept the stare of the sun off their heads, the heat still found its way between the branches. Trapped, it made the damp air steamy.

‘I haven’t been here for years,’ Trudi said, whipping a switch of stripped twig back and forth through a cloud of gnats. ‘I used to come with my brother.’

‘How is he?’ Joyce enquired.

‘Still in hospital. He’s never going to come out. All the family knows that but nobody ever says it. Makes me sick.’

Sam Katz had been drafted and gone to Vietnam fit in mind and body. In the third month of his tour of duty all that had been undone by a land mine, which had killed two of his comrades and badly injured him. There’d been a squirmingly uneasy homecoming, the Grove’s little mighty lined up to greet the crippled hero. What followed was much talk of heroism and sacrifice; much drinking; some hidden tears. Through it all Sam Katz had sat stony featured, not setting his face against the celebrations but detached from them, as though his mind were still rehearsing the moment when his youth had been blown to smithereens. A few weeks later he’d been taken back to hospital. Though his mother had told enquirers it was for corrective surgery to his spine the months dragged on until they became years, and Sam didn’t reappear. Everyone guessed the reason, though it went unadmitted. Sam’s physical wounds had healed adequately well. But his mind had not proved so resilient. The detachment he’d evidenced at his homecoming party had deepened into catatonia.

All the other girls had known Sam, though the age difference between Joyce and her brother had been sufficient for them to have looked upon him almost as another species. Not simply male, which was strange enough, but old, too. Once past puberty, however, the roller-coaster ride began to speed. They could see twenty-five up ahead: a little way yet, but visible. And the waste of Sam’s life began to make sense to them the way it could never have made sense to an eleven-year-old. Fond, sad memories of him silenced them for a while. They walked on through the heat, their bodies side by side, arms occasionally brushing arms, their minds diverging. Trudi’s thoughts were of those childhood games, played with Sam in these thickets. He’d been an indulgent older brother, allowing her to tag along when she was seven or eight, and he thirteen. A year later, when his juices started telling him girls and sisters weren’t the same animal, the invitations to play war had ceased. She’d mourned the loss of him; a rehearsal for the mourning she’d felt more acutely later. She saw his face in her mind now, a weird melding of the boy he’d been and the man he was; of the life he’d had and the death he lived. It made her hurt.

For Carolyn, there were few hurts, at least in her waking life. And today – barring her wishing she’d bought a second ice-cream – none. Night was quite a different matter. She had bad dreams; of earthquakes. In them Palomo Grove would fold up like a canvas chair and disappear into the earth. That was the penalty for knowing too much, her father had told her. She’d inherited his fierce curiosity, and had applied it – from first hearing of the San Andreas Fault – to a study of the earth they walked upon. Its solidity could not be trusted. Beneath their feet, she knew, the ground was riddled with fissures, which might at any moment gape, as they would gape beneath Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, all the way up and down the West Coast, swallowing the lot. She kept her anxieties at bay with swallowings of her own: a sort of sympathetic magic. She was fat because the earth’s crust was thin; an irrefutable excuse for gluttony.

Arleen cast a glance over at the Fat Girl. It never hurt, her mother had once instructed her, to keep the company of the less attractive. Though no longer in the public eye, the sometime star Kate Farrell still surrounded herself with dowdy women, in whose company her looks were twice as compelling. But for Arleen, especially on days like today, it seemed too high a price. Though they flattered her looks she didn’t really like her companions. Once she’d have counted them her dearest friends. Now they were reminders of a life from which she could not escape quickly enough. But how else was she going to spend the time ’til her parole came through? Even the joys of sitting in front of the mirror palled after a time. The sooner I’m out of here, she thought, the sooner I’m happy.

Had she been able to read Arleen’s mind Joyce would have applauded the urgency. But she was lost in thoughts of how best to arrange an accidental encounter with Randy. If she made a casual enquiry about his routines Arleen would guess her purpose, and she might be selfish enough to spike Joyce’s chances even though she had no interest in the boy herself. Joyce was a fine reader of character, and knew it was quite within Arleen’s capabilities to be so perverse. But then who was she to condemn perversity? She was pursuing a male who’d three times made his indifference to her perfectly plain. Why couldn’t she just forget him and save herself the grief of rejection? Because love wasn’t like that. It made you fly in the face of the evidence, however compelling.

She sighed audibly.

‘Something wrong?’ Carolyn wanted to know.

‘Just … hot,’ Joyce replied.

‘Anyone we know?’ Trudi said. Before Joyce could muster an adequately disparaging reply she caught sight of something glittering through the trees ahead.

‘Water,’ she said.

Carolyn had seen it too. Its brightness made her squint.

‘Lots of it,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know there was a lake down here,’ Joyce remarked, turning to Trudi.

‘There wasn’t,’ came the reply. ‘Not that I remember.’

‘Well there is now,’ said Carolyn.

She was already forging ahead through the foliage, not caring to take the less thronged route. Her blundering passage cleared a way for the others.

‘Looks like we’re going to get cool after all,’ Trudi said, and went after her at a run.

It was indeed a lake, maybe fifty feet wide, its placid surface broken by half-submerged trees, and islands of shrubbery.

‘Flood water,’ Carolyn said. ‘We’re right at the bottom of the hill here. It must have gathered after the storm.’

‘That’s a lot of water,’ Joyce said. ‘Did this all fall last night?’

‘If it didn’t where did it come from?’ Carolyn said.

‘Who cares?’ said Trudi. ‘It looks cool.’

She moved past Carolyn to the very edge of the water. The ground became more swampy underfoot with every step, mud rising up over her sandals. But the water, when she reached it, was as good as its promise: refreshingly cold. She crouched down, and put her hand in the lake, bringing a palmful of it up to splash her face.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Carolyn cautioned. ‘It’s probably full of chemicals.’

‘It’s only rain-water,’ Trudi replied. ‘What’s cleaner than that?’

Carolyn shrugged. ‘Please yourself,’ she said.

‘I wonder how deep it is?’ Joyce mused. ‘Deep enough to swim, do you think?’

‘Shouldn’t have thought so,’ Carolyn commented.

‘Don’t know ’til we try,’ Trudi said, and began to wade out into the lake. She could see grass and flowers beneath her feet; drowned now. The earth itself was soft, and her steps stirred up clouds of mud, but she advanced until she was in deep enough for the hem of her shorts to be soaked.

The water was cold. It brought gooseflesh. But that was preferable to the sweat that had stuck her blouse to her breasts and spine. She looked back towards the shore.

‘Feels great,’ she said. ‘I’m going in.’

‘Like that?’ Arleen said.

‘Of course not.’ Trudi waded back towards the trio, pulling her blouse out of her shorts as she went. The air rising from the water tingled against her skin, its frisson welcome. She wore nothing beneath, and would normally have been more modest, even in front of her friends, but the lake’s invitation was not to be postponed.

‘Anybody going to join me?’ she asked as she stepped back amongst the others.

‘I am,’ Joyce said, already unknotting her trainers.

‘I think we should keep our shoes on,’ Trudi said. ‘We don’t know what’s underfoot.’

‘It’s only grass,’ said Joyce. She sat down and worked on the knots, grinning. ‘This is great,’ she said.

Arleen was watching her whooping enthusiasm with disdain.

‘You two not joining us?’ Trudi said.

‘No,’ Arleen said.

‘Afraid your mascara’ll run?’ Joyce replied, her grin widening.

‘Nobody’s going to see,’ said Trudi, before a rift developed. ‘Carolyn? What about you?’

The girl shrugged. ‘Can’t swim,’ she said.

‘It’s not deep enough to swim in.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Carolyn observed. ‘You only waded out a few yards.’

‘So stay close to the shore. You’ll be safe there.’

‘Maybe,’ Carolyn said, far from convinced.

‘Trudi’s right,’ Joyce said, sensing Carolyn’s reluctance was as much to do with uncovering her fat as with swimming. ‘Who’s going to see us?’

As she stripped off her shorts it occurred to her that any number of peepers might be hidden amongst the trees, but what the heck? Wasn’t the Reverend forever saying life was short? Best not to waste it then. She stepped out of her underwear and started into the water.

William Witt knew each one of the bathers’ names. In fact he knew the names of every woman in the Grove under forty, and where they lived, and which was their bedroom window; a feat of memory which he declined to boast of to any of his schoolmates for fear they spread it around. Though he could see nothing wrong with looking through windows he knew enough to know it was frowned upon. And yet he’d been born with eyes, hadn’t he? Why shouldn’t he use them? Where was the harm in watching? It wasn’t like stealing, or lying, or killing people. It was just doing what God had created eyes to do, and he couldn’t see what was criminal in that.

He crouched, hidden by trees, half a dozen yards from the edge of the water, and twice that distance from the girls, watching them undress. Arleen Farrell was hanging back, he saw, which frustrated him. To see her naked would be an achievement even he’d not be able to keep to himself. She was the most beautiful girl in Palomo Grove: sleek and blonde and snooty, the way movie stars were supposed to be. The other two, Trudi Katz and Joyce McGuire, were already in the water, so he turned his attentions to Carolyn Hotchkiss, who was even now taking off her bra. Her breasts were heavy, and pink, and the sight of them made him hard in his trousers. Though she stripped off her shorts and briefs he kept staring at her breasts. He couldn’t understand the fascination some of the other boys – he was ten – had with that lower part; it seemed so much less exciting than the bosom, which was as different from girl to girl as her nose or hips. The other, the part he didn’t like any of the words for, seemed to him quite uninteresting: a patch of hair with a slit buried in the middle. What was the big deal about that?

He watched as Carolyn stepped into the water, only just suppressing a giggle of pleasure when she responded to the cold water with a half step backwards which set her flesh jiggling like jello.

‘Come on! It’s wonderful!’ the Katz girl was coaxing her.

Plucking up her courage, Carolyn advanced a few more steps.

And now – William could scarcely believe his luck – Arleen was taking off her hat and unbuttoning her halter top. She was joining them after all. He forgot the others and fixed his gaze on Miss Sleek. As soon as he’d realized what the girls – whom he’d been following for an hour, unsuspected – were planning to do, his heart had started thumping so hard he thought he’d be ill. Now that thump redoubled, as the prospect of Arleen’s breasts came before him. Nothing – not even fear of death – would have made him look away. He set himself the challenge of memorizing every tiny motion, so as to add veracity to his account when he told it to disbelievers.

She went slowly about it. If he’d not known better he’d have suspected she knew she had an audience, the way she teased and paraded. Her bosom was a disappointment. Not as large as Carolyn’s, nor boasting large, dark nipples like Joyce’s. But the overall impression, when she stepped from her cut-off jeans and slid down her briefs, was wonderful. It made him feel almost panicky to see her. His teeth chattered like he had the flu. His face got hot, his innards seemed to rattle. Later in life William would tell his analyst that this was the first moment he realized that he was going to die. In fact that was hindsight speaking. Death was very far from his mind now. And yet the sight of Arleen’s nakedness, and his invisibility as he witnessed it, did mark this moment as one which he would never quite outgrow. Events were about to occur that would temporarily make him wish he’d never come peeping (he’d live in fear of the memory, in fact), but when, after several years, the terror mellowed, he returned to the image of Arleen Farrell stepping into the waters of this sudden lake, as to an icon.

It was not the moment that he first knew he was going to die; but it was perhaps the first time he understood that ceasing would not be so bad, if beauty was there to escort him on his way.

The lake was seductive, its embrace cool but reassuring. There was no undertow, as at the beach. No surf beating against your back nor salt stinging your eyes. It was like a swimming pool created for the four of them only; an idyll that no one else in the Grove had access to.

Trudi was the strongest swimmer of the quartet, and it was she who headed from the shore with the greatest vigour, discovering as she went that contrary to expectation the water was getting deeper all the time. It must have gathered where the ground dipped naturally, she reasoned, perhaps even in a place where there’d once been a small lake, though she could remember no such spot from her ramblings with Sam. The grass had now gone from beneath her toes, which brushed instead bare rock.

‘Don’t go too far,’ Joyce called to her.

She turned. The shore was further than she’d estimated, the glaze of water in her eyes reducing her friends to three pink blurs, one blonde, two brunettes, half submerged in the same sweet-tasting element as she. It would be impossible to keep this fragment of Eden to themselves unfortunately. Arleen would be bound to talk about it. By evening the secret would be out. By tomorrow, thronged. They’d better make the most of their privacy. So thinking, she struck out for the middle of the lake.

Ten yards closer to shore, sculling along on her back in water no more than navel-deep, Joyce watched Arleen at the lake’s edge, stooping to splash her belly and breasts. A spasm of envy for her friend’s beauty went through her. No wonder the Randy Krentzmans of the world went gaga at the sight of her. She found herself wondering what it would be like to stroke Arleen’s hair, the way a boy would, or kiss her breasts, or her lips. The idea possessed her so suddenly and so forcibly she lost her balance in the water, and swallowed a mouthful as she tried to right herself. Once she had, she turned her back on Arleen, and with a splashing stroke headed into deeper waters.

Up ahead Trudi was shouting something to her.

‘What did you say?’ Joyce yelled back, subduing her stroke so as to hear better.

Trudi was laughing. ‘Warm!’ she said, splashing around, ‘it’s warm out here!’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Come and feel!’ Trudi replied.

Joyce began to swim out to where Trudi was treading water, but her friend was already turning from her to follow the call of the warmth. Joyce could not resist glancing back at Arleen. She had finally deigned to join the swimming party, immersing herself ’til her long hair spread around her neck like a golden collar, then starting an even-paced stroke towards the centre of the lake. Joyce felt something close to fear at the thought of Arleen’s proximity. She wanted some leavening company.

‘Carolyn!’ she called. ‘Are you coming?’

Carolyn shook her head.

‘It’s warmer out here,’ Joyce promised.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Really it is!’ Trudi shouted. ‘It’s beautiful!’

Carolyn seemed to relent, and began to splash her way in Trudi’s wake.

Trudi swam on a few more yards. The water was not getting any warmer, but it was becoming more agitated, bubbling up around her like a Jacuzzi. Suddenly unnerved she tried to touch bottom, but the ground had gone from beneath her. Mere yards behind her the water had been at most four and a half feet deep; now her toes didn’t even graze solid earth. The ground must have slid away violently, at almost the same spot that the warm current had appeared. Taking courage from the fact that three strokes would take her back to safety she ducked her head below the water.

Though her eyes were bad at a distance her short-range sight was good, and the water was clear. She could see down the length of her body to her pedalling feet. Beyond them, solid darkness. The ground had simply vanished. Shock made her gasp. She breathed water in through her nose. Spluttering and flailing she threw her head up to snatch some air.

Joyce was yelling to her.

‘Trudi? What’s wrong? Trudi?’

She tried to form some words of warning, but a primal terror had seized her: all she could do was throw herself in the direction of the shore, her panic merely churning the water to fresh and choking frenzy. Darkness below, and something warm there, waiting to pull me down.

In his hiding place on the shore William Witt saw the girl struggling. Her panic made him lose his erection. Something odd was happening out on the lake. He could see darts on the water’s surface, circling Trudi Katz, like fish that were only just submerged. Some were breaking off and sliding towards the other girls. He didn’t dare cry out. If he did they’d know he’d been spying on them. All he could do was watch with mounting trepidation as the events in the lake unfolded.

Joyce felt the warmth next. It ran over her skin and inside her too, like a swallow of Christmas brandy, coating her innards. The sensation distracted her from Trudi’s splashing, and indeed from her own jeopardy. She watched the darting water, and the bubbles breaking the surface all around her, popping like lava, slow and thick, with an odd detachment. Even when she tried to touch bottom, and couldn’t, the thought that she might drown was a casual one. There were more important feelings. One, that the air breaking from the bubbles around her was the lake’s breath, and breathing it was like kissing the lake. Two, that Arleen would be swimming this way very soon, the golden collar of hair floating in the water behind her. Seduced by the pleasure of the warm water, she didn’t forbid herself the thoughts she’d turned her back on mere moments before. Here they were, she and Arleen, buoyed up in the same body of sweet water, getting closer and closer to each other, while the element between them carried the echoes of their every motion back and forth. Perhaps they would dissolve in the water, their bodies become fluid, until they mingled in the lake. She and Arleen, one mixture, released from any need for shame; beyond sex into blissful singularity.

The possibility was too exquisite to be postponed a moment longer. She threw her arms above her head and let herself sink. The spell of the lake, however, powerful as it was, couldn’t quite discipline the animal panic that rose in her as the water closed over her head. Without her willing it, her body began to resist the pact she’d made with the water. She began to struggle wildly, reaching up to the surface as if to snatch a handhold of air.

Both Arleen and Trudi saw Joyce go under. Arleen instantly went to her aid, shouting as she swam. Her agitation was matched by the water around her. Bubbles rose on all sides. She felt their passage, like hands brushing her belly, her breasts and between her legs. At their caress the same dreaminess that had caught Joyce, and had now subdued Trudi’s panic, took hold of her. There was no specific object of desire to carry her under, however. Joyce was conjuring the image of Randy Krentzman (who else?) but for Arleen her seducer was a crazy quilt of famous faces. Dean’s cheekbones, Sinatra’s eyes, Brando’s sneer. She succumbed to this patchwork the same way Joyce and, a few yards from her Trudi, had. She threw up her arms and let the waters take her.

From the safety of the shallows Carolyn watched the behaviour of her friends, appalled. Seeing Joyce go under she’d assumed there was something in the water, dragging her down. But the behaviour of Arleen and Trudi gave the lie to that. She witnessed them plainly giving up. Nor was this simple suicide. She’d been close enough to Arleen to observe a look of pleasure crossing that beautiful face before it sank. She’d even smiled! Smiled, then let herself go.

These three girls were Carolyn’s only friends in the world. She could not simply watch them drown. Though the water where they’d disappeared was becoming more frenzied by the moment she struck out for the place using the only stroke she was faintly proficient in: an ungainly mixture of doggy-paddle and crawl. Natural laws, she knew, were on her side. Fat floated. But that was little comfort as she saw the ground falling away beneath her feet. The bottom of the lake had vanished. She was swimming over a fissure, which was somehow claiming the other girls.

Ahead of her, an arm broke surface. In desperation she reached for it. Reached; snatched; connected. As she took hold, however, the water around her began to churn with fresh fury. She made a cry of horror. Then the hand she’d grasped took fierce hold of her, and dragged her down.

The world went out like a pinched flame. Her senses deserted her. If she was still holding somebody’s fingers she couldn’t feel them. Nor, though her eyes were open, could she see anything in the murk. Vaguely, distantly, she was aware that her body was drowning; that her lungs were filling with water through her gaping mouth, her last breath leaving her. But her mind had forsaken its casing and was drifting away from the flesh it had been hostage to. She saw that flesh now: not with her physical eyes (they were still in her head, rolling wildly) but with her mind’s sight. A barrel of fat, rolling and pitching as it sank. She felt nothing for its demise, except perhaps disgust at the rolls of blubber, and the absurd inelegance of her distress. In the water beyond her body the other girls still resisted. Their thrashings were also, she presumed, merely instinctual. Their minds, like hers, had probably floated out of their heads, and were watching the spectacle with the same dispassion. True, their bodies were more attractive than hers, and thus perhaps more painful in the losing. But resistance was, in the end, a waste of effort. They were all going to die very soon, here in the middle of this midsummer lake. Why?

As she asked the question her eyeless gaze offered the answer. There was something in the darkness below her floating mind. She could not see it, but she felt it. A power – no, two powers – whose breaths were the bubbles that had broken around them and whose arms the eddies that beckoned them to be corpses. She looked back at her body, which still struggled for air. Her legs were pedalling the water madly. Between them, her virgin cunt. Momentarily she felt a pang for pleasures that she’d never risked pursuing, and would never now have. Damn fool that she was, to have valued pride over sensation. Mere ego seemed a nonsense now. She should have asked for the act from every man who’d looked at her twice, and not been content ’til one had said yes. All that system of nerves and tubes and eggs, going to death unused. The waste of it was the only thing here that smacked of tragedy.

Her gaze returned to the darkness of the fissure. The twin forces she’d sensed there were still approaching. She could see them now; vague forms, like stains in the water. One was bright; or at least brighter than the other. But that was the only distinction she could make. If either had features they were too blurred to be seen, and the rest – limbs and torso – were lost in the shoals of dark bubbles that rose with them. They could not disguise their purpose, however. Her mind grasped that all too easily. They were emerging from the fissure to claim the flesh from which her thoughts were now mercifully disconnected. Let them have their bounty, she thought. It had been a burden, that body, and she was glad to be rid of it. The rising powers had no jurisdiction over her thoughts; nor sought any. Flesh was their ambition; and they each wanted the entire quartet. Why else were they struggling with each other, stains light and dark interwoven like a barber’s pole as they rose to snatch the bodies down?

She had assumed herself free prematurely. As the first tendrils of mingled spirit touched her foot the precious moments of liberation ceased. She was called back into her cranium, the door of her skull slamming behind her with a crack. Eye-sight replaced mind-sight; pain and panic, that sweet detachment. She saw the warring spirits wrap themselves around her. She was a morsel, pulled back and forth between them as they each fought to possess her. The why of it beyond her. She would be dead in seconds. It mattered not at all to her which claimed the corpse, the bright or the less than bright. Both, if they wanted her sex (she felt their investigations there, even at the last), would have no joy back from her, nor from any of them. They were gone; the four of them.

Even as she relinquished the last bubble of breath from her throat, a gleam of sunlight hit her eyes. Could it be she was rising again? Had they dismissed her body as redundant to their purpose, and let the fat float? She snatched the chance, however small it was, pushing up towards the surface. A new shoal of bubbles rose with her, that almost seemed to bear her up towards the air. It was closer by the instant. If she could hold on to consciousness a heartbeat longer she might yet survive.

God loved her! She broke surface face-first, puking water then drinking air. Her limbs were numb, but the very forces that had been so intent on drowning her now kept her afloat. After three or four breaths she realized the others had also been released. They choked and splashed around her. Joyce was already making towards the shore, pulling Trudi after her. Arleen now began to follow. Solid ground was only a few yards away. Even with legs and arms barely functional Carolyn covered the distance, until all four of them could stand up. Bodies racked with sobs they staggered towards dry land. Even now they cast backward glances, for fear whatever had assaulted them decided to pursue them into the shallows. But the spot in the middle of the lake was completely placid.

Before they’d reached the shore, hysteria took hold of Arleen. She began to wail, and shudder. Nobody went to comfort her. They had barely sufficient energy to advance one foot in front of the other, never mind waste breath in trying to calm the girl. She overtook Trudi and Joyce to reach the grass first, dropping down on the ground where she’d left her clothes and attempting to drag on her blouse, her sobs redoubling as she struggled, failing to find the armholes. A yard from the shore Trudi fell to her knees and threw up. Carolyn trudged down-wind of her, knowing that if she caught a whiff of vomit she’d end up doing the same. It was a wasted manoeuvre. The gagging sound was sufficient cue. She felt her stomach flip; then she was painting the grass in bile and icecream.

Even now, though the scene he was watching had moved from the erotic to the terrifying to the nauseating, William Witt could not take his eyes off it. To the end of his life he’d remember the sight of the girls rising from the depths where he was certain they must have drowned, their efforts, or pressure from below, shoving them up into the air so high he saw their breasts bob.

Now the waters that had almost claimed them were still. Not a ripple moved; not a bubble broke. And yet, could he doubt that something other than an accident had occurred in front of him? There was something alive in the lake. The fact that he’d seen only its consequences – the flailings, the screams – rather than the thing itself, shook him to the gut. Nor would he ever be able to quiz the girls as to their assailants’ nature. He was alone with what he’d seen.

For the first time in his life his self-elected role as voyeur weighed heavily upon him. He swore to himself he’d never spy on anyone again. It was an oath he kept for a day before breaking.

As to this event, he’d had enough of it. All he could see of the girls now were the outlines of their hips and buttocks as they lay in the grass. All he could hear, with the vomiting over, was weeping.

As quietly as he could, he slipped away.

Joyce heard him go. She sat up in the grass.

‘Somebody’s watching us,’ she said.

She studied the patch of sunlit foliage, and again it moved. Just the wind, catching the leaves.

Arleen had finally found her way into her blouse. She sat with her arms wrapped around her. ‘I want to die,’ she said.

‘No you don’t,’ Trudi told her. ‘We just escaped that.’

Joyce put her hands back to her face. The tears she thought she’d bettered came again, in a wave.

‘What in Christ’s name happened?’ she said. ‘I thought it was just … flood water.’

It was Carolyn who supplied the answer, her voice without inflexion, but shaking.

‘There are caves under the whole town,’ she said. ‘They must have filled with water during the storm. We swam out over the mouth of one of them.’

‘It was so dark,’ Trudi said. ‘Did you look down?’

‘There was something else,’ Arleen said. ‘Besides the darkness. Something in the water.’

Joyce’s sobs intensified in response to this.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ Carolyn said. ‘But I felt it.’ She looked at Trudi. ‘We all felt the same, didn’t we?’

‘No,’ Trudi replied, shaking her head. ‘It was currents out of the caves.’

‘It tried to drown me,’ Arleen said.

‘Just currents,’ Trudi reiterated. ‘It’s happened to me before, at the beach. Undertow. Pulled the legs from under me.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ Arleen said flatly. ‘Why bother to lie? We all know what we felt.’

Trudi stared hard at her.

‘And what was that?’ she said. ‘Exactly.’

Arleen shook her head. With her hair plastered to her scalp and mascara smeared across her cheeks, she looked anything but the Prom Queen beauty of ten minutes before.

‘All I know is it wasn’t undertow,’ she said. ‘I saw shapes. Two shapes. Not fishes. Nothing like fishes.’ She looked away from Trudi, down between her legs. ‘I felt them touch me,’ she said, shuddering. ‘Touch me inside.’

‘Shut up!’ Joyce suddenly erupted. ‘Don’t say it.’

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Arleen replied. ‘Isn’t it?’ She looked up again. First at Joyce, then at Carolyn; finally at Trudi, who nodded.

‘Whatever’s out there wanted us because we’re women.’

Joyce’s sobs climbed to a fresh plateau.

‘Keep quiet,’ Trudi snapped. ‘We’ve got to think about this.’

‘What’s to think?’ Carolyn said.

‘What we’re going to say for one thing,’ Trudi replied.

‘We say we went swimming –’ Carolyn began.

‘Then what?’

‘– we went swimming and –’

‘Something attacked us? Tried to get inside us? Something not human?’

‘Yes,’ said Carolyn. ‘It’s the truth.’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Trudi said. ‘They’ll laugh at us.’

‘But it’s still true,’ Carolyn insisted.

‘You think that makes any difference? They’ll say we were idiots to go swimming in the first place. Then they’ll say we got the cramps or something.’

‘She’s right,’ said Arleen.

But Carolyn clung to her convictions. ‘Suppose somebody else comes here?’ she said. ‘And the same thing happens. Or they drown. Suppose they drown. Then we’d be responsible.’

‘If this is just flood water it’ll be gone in a few days,’ Arleen said. ‘If we say anything everyone in town will talk about us. We’ll never live it down. It’ll spoil the rest of our lives.’

‘Don’t be such an actress,’ Trudi said. ‘We’re none of us going to do anything we don’t all agree on. Right? Right, Joyce?’ There was a stifled sob of acknowledgement from Joyce. ‘Carolyn?’

‘I suppose so,’ came the reply.

‘We just have to agree on a story.’

‘We say nothing,’ Arleen replied.

‘Nothing?’ said Joyce. ‘Look at us.’

‘Never explain. Never apologize,’ Trudi murmured.

‘Huh?’

‘It’s what my daddy says all the time.’ The thought of this being a family philosophy seemed to brighten her. ‘Never explain …’

‘We heard,’ said Carolyn.

‘So it’s agreed,’ Arleen went on. She stood up, gathering the rest of her clothes from the ground.

‘We all keep quiet about it.’

There was no further sound of argument from any source. Taking their cue from Arleen, they all proceeded to dress then headed back towards the road, leaving the lake to its secrets and its silences.

II
i

At first, nothing happened. There were not even nightmares. Only a pleasant languor, affecting all four of them, which was perhaps the after-glow of coming so close to death and walking away from it. They concealed their bruises from view, and went about being themselves, and keeping their secret.

In a sense it kept itself. Even Arleen, who had been the first to voice her horror at the intimate assault they’d all suffered, rapidly came to take a strange pleasure in the memory, which she didn’t dare confess, even to the other three. In fact they spoke to each other scarcely at all. They didn’t need to. The same strange conviction moved in all of them: that they were, in some extraordinary fashion, the chosen. Only Trudi, who’d always had a love of the Messianic, would have put such a word to what she felt. For Arleen, the feeling was simply a reinforcing of what she’d always known about herself: that she was a uniquely glamorous creature, for whom the rules by which the rest of the world was run did not apply. For Carolyn, it meant a new confidence in herself which was a dim echo of that revelation she’d had when death had seemed imminent: that every hour without appetites fulfilled was wasted. For Joyce, the feeling was simpler still. She had been saved from death for Randy Krentzman.

She wasted no time in making her passion known. The very day after the events at the lake she went directly to the Krentzman house in Stillbrook and told him in the plainest possible terms that she loved him and intended to sleep with him. He didn’t laugh. He simply looked at her with bewilderment, then asked her, somewhat shamefaced, whether they knew each other. On previous occasions his forgetting her had practically broken her heart. But something had changed in her. She was no longer so fragile. Yes, she told him, you do know me. We’ve met several times before. But I don’t care if you remember me or not. I love you and I want you to make love to me. He went on staring at her through this speech, then said: this is some joke, right? To which she replied that it absolutely was not a joke, that she meant every word she said, and given that the day was warm and the house empty but for the two of them was there any time better than the present?

Bewilderment had not undone the Krentzman libido. Though he didn’t understand why this girl was offering herself gratis, an opportunity like this came along too infrequently to be despised. Thus, attempting the tone of one to whom such proposals come daily, he accepted. They spent the afternoon together, performing the act not once but three times. She left the house around six-fifteen and wended her way home through the Grove with a sense of some imperative satisfied. It was not love. He was dim, self-centred, and a sloppy lover. But he had perhaps put life into her that afternoon, or at least offered his teaspoonful of stuff to the alchemy, and that was all she’d really wanted from him. This change of priorities went unquestioned. Her mind was crystal clear on the need for fecundity. On the rest of life, past, future and present, it was a blur.

Early the next morning, having slept more deeply than she had for years, she called him up, and suggested a second liaison, that very afternoon. Was I that good? he enquired. She told him he was better than good; he was a bull; his dick the world’s eighth wonder. He readily agreed, both to the flattery and the liaison.

Of the quartet she turned out to be perhaps the luckiest in her choice of mates. Vain and empty-headed though Krentzman was, he was also harmless, and in his inept way, tender. The urge that took Joyce to his bed, working with equal vigour upon Arleen, Trudi and Carolyn, drove the others into less conventional embraces.

Carolyn made overtures to one Edgar Lott, a man in his mid-fifties who had moved down the street from her parents’ house the year before. None of the neighbours had become friendly with him. He was a loner; his only company two dachshunds. These, the absence of female visitors, and most particularly his penchant for colour co-ordination in his dress (handkerchief, neck-tie and socks always in matching pastel) led all to assume he was homosexual. But naive as Carolyn was in the particularities of intercourse she knew Lott better than her elders. She’d caught his eye several times, and hindsight told her his looks had meant more than hello. Intercepting him as he took the dachshunds for their morning constitutional she got to talking with him, then asked – when the dogs had marked their territory for the day – if maybe she could come home with him. Later, he would tell her that his intentions had been perfectly honourable, and if she hadn’t thrown herself upon him, demanding his devotion on the kitchen table, he would not have laid a finger on her. But with the offer there, how could he refuse?

Mismatched in years and anatomy they nevertheless coupled with a rare fury, the dachshunds sent into a frenzy of jealousy as they did so, yapping and chasing their tails ’til they exhausted themselves. After the first bout he told her he hadn’t touched a woman in the six years since his wife’s death, which had driven him to alcohol. She too, he said, had been a substantial creature. Talk of her girth made him hard again. They set to. This time the dogs just slept.

At first, the match worked well. Neither was the least judgemental when it came to the removal of clothes; neither wasted time with declarations on the other’s beauty, which would have sounded ridiculous; neither pretended this was forever. They were together to do what nature had designed their bodies to do, careless of the frills. Not for them the candlelit romance. Day in, day out she went visiting Mr Lott, as she referred to him in her parents’ company, only to have his face between her breasts seconds after the door was closed.

Edgar could hardly believe his luck. That she’d seduced him was extraordinary enough (even in his youth no woman had ever paid him that compliment); that she came back, and back again, unable to keep her hands off him until the act was thoroughly performed, verged on the miraculous. He was not surprised therefore when, after two weeks and four days, she stopped visiting. A little saddened, but not surprised. After a week of her absence he saw her on the street and he asked her politely if – quote, unquote – we could resume our hanky-panky? She looked at him strangely, then told him no. He hadn’t sought an explanation, but she offered one anyway. I don’t need you any more, she told him lightly, and tapped her stomach. Only later, sitting in his stale house with his third bourbon in his hand, did he realize what the words and the gesture meant. It drove him to a fourth and a fifth. A return to his old ways all too rapidly followed. Though he had tried very hard to keep sentiment out of the exchange, now – with the fat girl gone – he realized she had broken his heart.

Arleen had no such problems. The path she chose, pressed by the same unspoken dictate as the rest, took her into the kind of company which wore their hearts not on their sleeves, but on their forearms, in Prussian blue ink. It had begun for her, as it had for Joyce, the day after their near-drowning. She’d dressed up in her finest clothes, got in her mother’s car, and taken herself off down to Eclipse Point, a small stretch of beach north of Zuma, notorious for its bars and its bikers. The occupants of the area were not all that surprised to see a rich girl in their midst. Such types regularly drove down from their fancy houses to taste the low-life, or have the low-life taste them. A couple of hours was usually enough, before they beat a retreat, back to where the closest they got to rough trade was the chauffeur.

In its time the Point had seen some famous faces come, incognito, looking to suck on its underbelly a while. Jimmy Dean had been a regular in his wildest times, seeking a smoker who wanted a human ash-tray. One of the bars had a pool table sacred to the memory of Jayne Mansfield, who had reputedly performed on it an act even now spoken of only in reverential whispers. Another had carved in the boards of its floor the outline of a woman who had claimed to be Veronica Lake, and had passed out dead drunk on that spot. Arleen, therefore, followed a well-trodden path from luxury’s lap to the squalor of a bar she chose for no better reason than its name: The Slick. Unlike many who had preceded her, however, she didn’t need a drink to give her an excuse for licentiousness. She simply offered herself. There were any number of takers, amongst whom she made no distinction whatsoever. Nobody who came seeking failed to find.

The next night she came back for more, and for more the night after, her eyes fixing on her paramours as though she were addicted to them. Not all took advantage. Some, after that first night, viewed her warily, suspecting that such largesse was only offered by the mad or the diseased. Others found a streak of gallantry in them they’d not suspected, and tried to coax her up off the floor before the line had reached the runts of the pack. But she protested loudly and ripely at any such intervention; told them to leave her be. They withdrew. Some even joined the line again.

While Carolyn and Joyce were able to keep their affairs to themselves, Arleen’s behaviour could not go unnoticed indefinitely. After a week of her disappearing from the house in the middle of the evening and returning as dawn came up – a week in which her only reply to questions about where she was going was a quizzical look, almost as though she herself wasn’t sure – her father, Lawrence Farrell, decided to follow her. He considered himself a liberal parent, but if his princess was falling in with a bad crowd – footballers, maybe, or hippies – then he might be obliged to give her some advice. Once out of the Grove she drove like one demented, and he had to put his foot down just to keep a discreet distance. A mile or two shy of the beach he lost her. It took him an hour of scouring the parking lots before he found the car, parked outside The Slick. The bar’s reputation had reached even his liberally plugged ears. He entered, fearing for his jacket and his wallet. There was great commotion inside; a howling ring of men, beer-gutted animals with hair to the middle of their backs, gathered around some floor-show at the far end of the bar. There was no sign of Arleen. Satisfied that he’d made a mistake (she was probably simply walking the beach, watching the surf) he was about to leave when somebody began chanting his princess’s name.

‘Arleen! Arleen!’

He turned back. Was she watching the floor-show too? He dug through the crowd of on-lookers. There, at the centre, he found his beautiful child. Somebody was pouring beer into her mouth, while another performed with her that deed he, like all fathers, hated to think of his daughter performing, except – in dreams – with him. She looked like her mother, lying beneath this man; or rather, as her mother had looked that long ago when she’d still been capable of arousal. Thrashing and grinning, mad for the man on top of her. Lawrence yelled Arleen’s name, and stepped forward to pull the brute from his labour. Somebody told him to wait his turn. He hit the man on the jaw, a blow which sent the slob staggering back into the crowd, many of whom were already unzipped and primed. The fellow spat out a wad of blood, and launched himself at Lawrence, who complained as he was beaten to his knees that this was his daughter, his daughter … my God, his daughter. He didn’t give up his protests ’til his mouth was no longer capable of making the words. Even then he tried to crawl to where Arleen was lying, and slap her into recognition of what she was doing. But her admirers simply dragged him out and dumped him on the edge of the highway. There he lay for a while, until he could muster the energy to get to his feet. He staggered back to the car, and waited several hours, crying sometimes, until Arleen emerged.

She seemed quite unmoved by his bruises and his bloody shirt. When he told her he’d seen what she’d done she cocked her head slightly, as though she wasn’t entirely certain what he was talking about. He ordered her into his car. She went without protest. They drove home in silence.

Nothing was said that day. She stayed in her room, and played the radio, while Lawrence spoke to his lawyer about closing down The Slick, to the cops about bringing his assailants to justice, and his analyst about where he’d failed. That night she left again, in the early evening, or at least tried to. He intercepted her in the driveway however, and the round of recriminations postponed from the previous night erupted. All the time, she just stared at him, glassy-eyed. Her indifference inflamed him. She wouldn’t come inside when he asked her, nor would she tell why she was doing what she was doing. His concern became fury, his voice rising in decibels and his vocabulary in venom until he was calling her a whore at the top of his voice, and there were drapes being twitched aside all around the Crescent. Eventually, blinded by tears of sheer incomprehension, he struck her, and might have done further damage had Kate not intervened. Arleen didn’t wait. With her raging father in her mother’s custody she ran off, and found herself a ride down to the beach.

The Slick was raided that night. There were twenty-one arrests, mostly for minor drug offences, and the bar was closed down. When the officers arrived Lawrence Farrell’s princess was performing the same bump and grind number she’d been performing nightly for over a week. It was a story not even Lawrence’s crude attempts at bribery could keep out of the newspapers. It became prime reading material up and down the coast. Arleen was put into hospital for a full medical check-up. She was found to have two sexually transmitted diseases, plus an infestation of crabs, and was suffering the kind of wear and tear her exploits had been bound to induce. But at least she wasn’t pregnant. Lawrence and Kathleen Farrell thanked the Lord for that small mercy.

The revelations about Arleen’s forays to The Slick brought a severe tightening of parental controls around the town. Even in the East Grove there were noticeably fewer kids wandering the streets after dark. Illicit romance became tough to come by. Even Trudi, the last of the four, would soon be obliged to give up her partner, though she’d found a near-perfect cover for her activities: religion. She’d had the wit to seduce one Ralph Contreras, a man of mixed blood who worked as a gardener for the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Laureltree, and had a stammer of such proportions it to all intents and purposes left him speechless. She liked him that way. He provided the service she required, and kept his mouth shut about it. All in all, the perfect lover. Not that she cared much about his technique, as he valiantly played the male for her. He was simply a functionary. When he had completed his duties – and her body would tell her when that moment came – she would not think of him again. At least, so she told herself.

As it was, the affairs they were all having (Trudi’s included) were – because of Arleen’s indiscretions – quickly to become public knowledge. Though she might have found it easy to forget her trysts with Ralph the Silent, Palomo Grove would not.

ii

The newspaper reports about the scandalous secret life of small-town beauty Arleen Farrell were as explicit as the legal departments of those journals would permit, but the details had to be left for rumour to supply. A small black market in what were claimed to be photographs of the orgy proved lucrative, though the pictures were so dingy it was difficult to be sure they were of the real thing. The family itself – Lawrence, Kate, sister Jocelyn and brother Craig – had a brighter light thrown upon them. Folks living on the other side of the Grove rerouted their shopping trips so as to come along the Crescent past the house of infamy. Craig had to be taken out of school because his peers bullied him unmercifully for the dirt on his big sister; Kate upped her tranquillizer intake until she was slurring any word of more than two syllables. But there was worse to come. Three days after Arleen had been snatched back from the bikers’ den an interview purporting to be with one of Arleen’s nurses appeared in the Chronicle. It said that the Farrell girl spent most of her time in a sexual frenzy, her talk one obscenity after another, interrupted only by tears of frustration. This in itself was newsworthy enough. But, the report went on, the patient’s sickness went beyond that of an overheated libido. Arleen Farrell believed herself possessed.

The tale she told was elaborate, and bizarre. She, plus three of her friends, had gone swimming in a lake close to Palomo Grove, and been attacked by something that had entered them all. What this occupying entity had demanded of Arleen, and – presumably – of her fellow bathers, was that she get herself with child by whomever was available to provide the service. Hence her adventures at The Slick. The Devil in her womb had simply been looking for a surrogate father amid that rank company.

The article was presented with no trace of irony; the text of Arleen’s so-called confession was quite absurd enough without requiring editorial gilding. Only those in the Grove blind or illiterate failed to read the revelations brought on by drugs and beauty. No one considered there to be an iota of truth in her claims, of course, except the families of the friends Arleen had been out with on Saturday, July 28th. Though she didn’t name Joyce, Carolyn or Trudi the quartet were known to be fast friends. There could be no doubt in the minds of any who had a passing acquaintance with Arleen whom she’d written into her Satanic fantasies.

It rapidly became apparent that the girls would have to be shielded from the fall-out following Arleen’s preposterous claims. In the McGuire, Katz and Hotchkiss households the same exchange, give or take an endearment, took place.

The parent asked: ‘Do you want to leave the Grove for a while, until the worst of this blows over?’ To which the child replied: ‘No, I’m fine. Never better.’

‘Are you sure it’s not upsetting you, sweetheart?’

‘Do I look upset?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’m not upset.’

Such well-balanced children, the parents thought, to face the tragedy of a friend’s lunacy with this show of calm; aren’t they a credit to us?

For a few weeks they were just that: model daughters, bearing the stress of their situation with admirable aplomb. Then the perfect picture began to deteriorate, as oddities in their behaviour patterns made themselves apparent. It was a subtle process; one which might well have gone unnoticed for longer had the parents not been watching over their babies with such fastidiousness. First, the parents noticed their offspring keeping odd hours: sleeping at noon, and pacing at midnight. Food-fads appeared. Even Carolyn, who had never been known to refuse the edible, took a near pathological dislike to certain items: sea-food in particular. The girls’ air of serenity disappeared. It its place came moods that swung from the monosyllabic to the garrulous, the glacial to the crazed. It was Betty Katz who first suggested her daughter see the family doctor. Trudi didn’t object. Nor did she seem in the slightest surprised when Doctor Gottlieb pronounced her healthy in every respect; and pregnant.

Carolyn’s parents were the next to fear that the mystery of their offspring’s behaviour merited medical investigation. The news was the same, with the added rider that if their daughter intended to carry her child to full-term then it would be advisable if the mother-to-be lost thirty pounds.

If there had been any hope of denying a pattern in these diagnoses that hope was undone by the third and final proof. Joyce McGuire’s parents had been the most reluctant to concede their child’s complicity in this scandal, but finally they too sought examination of their daughter. She, like Carolyn and Trudi, was in good health. She too was pregnant. The news called for a reassessment of Arleen Farrell’s story. Was it possible that lurking beneath her insane ramblings was a shred of truth?

The parents met, and talked together. Between them they beat out the only scenario that made any sense. There had clearly been a pact of some kind made between the girls. They’d decided – for some reason known only to them – to become pregnant. Three of them had succeeded. Arleen had failed, and it had pitched what had always been a highly strung girl into the throes of a nervous breakdown. The problems that now had to be addressed were threefold. First, to locate the would-be fathers and then prosecute them for their sexual opportunism. Second, to terminate the pregnancies as quickly and safely as possible. Thirdly, to keep the whole business quiet so that the reputations of the three families would not suffer the same fate as that of the Farrells, whom the righteous inhabitants of the Grove now treated as pariahs.

In all three they failed. In the matter of the fathers simply because none of the girls, even under parental duress, would name the culprits. In the issue of aborting the babies, because again the children steadfastly refused to be brow-beaten into giving up what they’d wasted no little sweat procuring. And finally, in their attempts to keep the whole sorry business under wraps, because scandal likes the light, and it only took one indiscreet doctor’s receptionist to begin the journalists sniffing after fresh evidence of delinquency.

The story broke two days after the parents’ meeting, and Palomo Grove – which had been rocked by Arleen’s disclosures, but not overturned – sustained an almost mortal blow. The Mad Girl’s Tale had made interesting reading for the UFO sighting and Cancer Cure crowd, but it was essentially a one-off. These new developments, however, touched a much more sensitive nerve. Here were four families whose solid, well-heeled lives had been shattered by a pact made by their own daughters. Was there some kind of cult involved, the press demanded to know? Was the anonymous father conceivably the same man, a seducer of young women whose very namelessness left endless room for speculation. And what of the Farrell child, who’d first blown the whistle on what was being called the League of Virgins? Had she been driven to more extreme behaviour than her friends because, as the Chronicle was the first to report, she was actually infertile? Or had the others yet to unburden themselves of their true excesses? This was a story that would run and run. It had everything: sex, possession, families in chaos, small-town bitchery, sex, insanity and sex. What was more, it could only get better from here.

As the pregnancies advanced the press could follow the progress. And with luck there’d be some startling pay-off. The children would be all triplets, or black, or born dead.

Oh, the possibilities!

III

It was hushed at the centre of the storm; hushed and still. The girls heard the howls and accusations heaped on them from parents, press and peers alike, but weren’t much touched by them. The process that had begun in the lake continued on its own inevitable way, and they let it shape their minds as it had, and did, their bodies. They were calm as the lake was calm; their surface so placid the most violent attack upon it left not so much as a ripple.

Nor did they seek each other out during this time. Their interest in each other, and indeed in the outside world, dwindled to zero. All they cared to do was sit at home growing fuller, while controversy raged around them. That too, despite its early promise, dwindled as the months went by, and new scandals claimed the public’s attention. But the damage to the Grove’s equilibrium had been done. The League of Virgins had put the town on the Ventura County map in a fashion it would never have wished upon itself, but, given the fact, was determined to profit by. The Grove had more visitors that autumn than it had enjoyed since its creation, people determined to be able to boast that they’d visited that place; Crazyville; the place where girls made eyes at anything that moved if the Devil told them to.

There were other changes in the town, which were not so observable as the full bars and the bustling Mall. Behind closed doors the children of the Grove had to fight more vehemently for their privileges, as their parents, particularly the fathers of daughters, withdrew freedoms previously taken for granted. These domestic frays cracked several families, and broke some entirely. The alcohol intakes went up correspondingly; Marvin’s Food and Drug did exceptional business in hard liquor during October and November, the demand taking off into the stratosphere over the Christmas period, when, in addition to the usual festivities, incidents of drunkenness, adultery, wife-beating and exhibitionism turned Palomo Grove into a sinners’ paradise.

With the public holidays, and their private woundings, over, several families decided to move out of the Grove altogether, and a subtle reorganization of the town’s social structure began, as properties thought desirable – such as those in the Crescents (now marred by the Farrells’ presence) – fell in value, and were bought up by individuals who could never have dreamt of living in that neighbourhood the summer before.

So many consequences, from a battle in troubled waters.

That battle had not gone unwitnessed, of course. What William Witt had learned of secrecy in his short life as a voyeur proved invaluable as subsequent events unfolded. More than once he came close to telling somebody what he’d seen at the lake, but he resisted the temptation, knowing that the brief stardom he’d earn from it would have to be set against suspicion and possible punishment. Not only that; there was every chance he’d not even be believed. He kept the memory alive in his own head, however, by going back to where it had happened on a regular basis. In fact he’d returned there the day after it had all happened, to see if he could spot the occupants of the lake. But the water was already retreating. It had shrunk by perhaps a third overnight. After a week it had gone entirely, revealing a fissure in the ground which was evidently a point of access to the caves that ran beneath the town.

He wasn’t the only visitor to the spot. Once Arleen had unburdened herself of what had happened there that afternoon, countless sightseers came looking for the spot. The more perceptive amongst them quickly recognized it: the water had left the grass yellowed and dusted with dried silt. One or two even attempted to gain access to the caves, but the fissure presented a virtually straight drop with no ready means of descent. After a few days of fame the spot was left to itself and to William’s solitary visits. It gave him a strange satisfaction, going there, despite the fear he felt. A sense of complicity with the caves and their secret, not to mention the erotic frisson that came when he stood where he’d stood that day, and imagined again the nakedness of the bathers.

The fate of the girls didn’t much interest him. He read about them once in a while, and heard them talked about, but out of sight for William was pretty much out of mind. There were better things to watch. With the town in disarray he had much to spy on: casual seductions and abject slavery; furies; beatings; bloody-nosed farewells. One day, he thought, I’ll write all of this down. It’ll be called Witt’s Book, and everyone in it will know, when it’s published, that their secrets all belong to me.

When, on the infrequent occasions he did think of the girls’ present condition, it was thoughts of Arleen he favoured, simply because she was in a hospital where he couldn’t see her even if he wanted to, and his powerlessness, as for every voyeur, was a spur. She was sick in the head, he’d heard, and nobody quite knew why. She wanted men to come to her all the time, she wanted babies the way the others had babies, but she couldn’t and that was why she was sick. His curiosity concerning her died, however, when he overheard somebody report that the girl had lost all trace of her glamour.

‘She looks half dead’ was the way he’d heard it put. ‘Drugged and dead.’

After that, it was as if Arleen Farrell no longer existed, except as a beautiful vision, shedding her clothes on the edge of a silver lake. Of what that lake had done to her he cleansed his mind thoroughly.

Unfortunately the wombs of the quartet’s remaining members could not cast the experience and its consequence out except as a bawling reality, which new stage in the humiliation of Palomo Grove began on April 2nd, when the first of the League of Virgins gave birth.

Howard Ralph Katz was born to his eighteen-year-old mother Trudi at 3.46 am, by Caesarian section. He was frail, weighing a mere four pounds and two ounces when he first saw the light of the operating theatre. A child, it was agreed, who resembled his mother, for which his grandparents were duly grateful given that they had no clue as to the father. Howard had Trudi’s dark, deep-set eyes, and a spiral skull cap of brown hair, even at birth. Like his mother, who had also been premature, he had to fight for every breath during the first six days of his life, after which he strengthened quickly. On April 19th Trudi brought her son back to Palomo Grove, to nurse him in the place she knew best.

Two weeks after Howard Katz saw the light, the second of the League of Virgins gave birth. This time there was something more for the press to elaborate on than the production of a sickly baby boy. Joyce McGuire gave birth to twins, one of each, born within a minute of each other in a perfectly uncomplicated fashion. She named them Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray, names she’d chosen (though she would never admit this, not to the end of her days) because they had two fathers: one in Randy Krentzman, one in the lake. Three, if she counted their Father in Heaven, though she feared he’d long passed her over in favour of less compatible souls.

Just over a week after the birth of the McGuire twins Carolyn also produced twins, boy and girl, but the boy was delivered dead. The girl, who was big-boned and strong, was named Linda. With her birth the saga of the League of Virgins seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. The funeral of Carolyn’s other child drew a small audience, but otherwise the four families were left alone. Too much alone in fact. Friends ceased to call; acquaintances denied ever having known them. The story of the League of Virgins had besmirched Palomo Grove’s good name, and despite the profit the town had earned from the scandal there was now a general desire to forget that the incident had ever occurred.

Pained by the rejection they sensed from every side the Katz family made plans to leave the Grove and return to Alan Katz’s home city, Chicago. They sold their home in late June to an out-of-towner who got a bargain, a fine property and a reputation in one fell swoop. The Katz family were gone two weeks later.

It proved to be good timing. Had they delayed their departure by a few more days they would have been caught up in the last tragedy of the League’s story. On the evening of July 26th the Hotchkiss family went out for a short while, leaving Carolyn at home with baby Linda. They stayed out longer than they intended, and it was well after midnight, and therefore the 27th, when they got back. Carolyn had celebrated the anniversary of her swim by smothering her daughter and taking her own life. She had left a suicide note, which explained, with the same chilling detachment the girl had used to talk of the San Andreas Fault, that Arleen Farrell’s story had been true all along. They had gone swimming. They had been attacked. To this day she did not know what by, but she had sensed its presence in her, and in the child, ever since, and it was evil. That was why she had smothered Linda. That was why she was now going to slit her wrists. Don’t judge me too harshly, she asked. I never wanted to hurt anybody in my life.

The letter was interpreted by the parents thus: that the girls had indeed been attacked and raped by somebody, and for reasons of their own had kept the identity of the culprit or culprits to themselves. With Carolyn dead, Arleen insane and Trudi gone to Chicago, it fell upon Joyce McGuire to tell the whole truth, without excision or addition, and to lay the story of the League of Virgins to rest.

At first, she refused. She couldn’t remember anything about that day, she claimed. The trauma had wiped the memory from her mind. Neither Hotchkiss or Farrell were content with that, however. They kept applying the pressure, through Joyce’s father. Dick McGuire was not a strong man, either in spirit or body, and his Church was wholly unsupportive in the matter, siding with the non-Mormons against the girl. The truth had to be told.

At last, to keep the brow-beaters from doing any more damage to her father than they already had, Joyce told. It made a strange scene. The six parents, plus Pastor John, who was the spiritual leader of the Mormon community in the Grove and its surrounds, were sitting in the McGuires’ dining room listening to the pale, thin girl whose hands went first to one cradle then to the other as she rocked her children to sleep telling, as she rocked, of their conception. First she warned her audience that they weren’t going to like what she was about to tell. Then she justified her warning with the telling. She gave them the whole story. The walk; the lake; the swim; the things that had fought over their bodies in the water; their escape; her passion for Randy Krentzman – whose family had been one of those to leave the Grove months before, presumably because he’d made a quiet confession of his own; the desire she’d shared with all the girls to get pregnant as efficiently as possible –

‘So Randy Krentzman was responsible for them all?’ Carolyn’s father said.

‘Him?’ she said. ‘He wasn’t capable.’

‘So who was?’

‘You promised to tell the whole story,’ the Pastor reminded her.

‘So I am,’ she replied. ‘As far as I know it. Randy Krentzman was my choice. We all know how Arleen went about it. I’m sure Carolyn found somebody different. And Trudi too. The fathers weren’t important, you see. They were just men.’

‘Are you saying the Devil is in you, child?’ the Pastor asked.

‘No.’

‘The children, then?’

‘No. No.’ She rocked both cradles now, one with each hand. ‘Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray aren’t possessed. At least not the way you mean. They just aren’t Randy’s children. Maybe they’ve got some of his good looks …’ she allowed herself a tiny smile. ‘… I’d like that,’ she said. ‘Because he was so very handsome. But the spirit that made them is in the lake.’

‘There is no lake,’ Arleen’s father pointed out.

‘There was that day. And maybe there will be again, if it rains hard enough.’

‘Not if I can help it.’

Whether he entirely believed Joyce’s story or not Farrell was as good as his word. He and Hotchkiss rapidly raised sufficient donations from around town to have the entrance to the caves sealed up. Most of the contributors signed a cheque simply to get Farrell off their doorstep. Since his princess had lost her mind he had all the conversational skill of a ticking bomb.

In October, a few days short of fifteen months after the girls had first gone down to the water, the fissure was blocked with concrete. They would go there again, but not for many years.

Until then, the children of Palomo Grove could play in peace.

PART THREE

I

Of the hundreds of erotic magazines and films which William Witt purchased as he grew to manhood over the next seventeen years, first by mail order then later taking trips into Los Angeles for that express purpose, his favourites were always those in which he was able to glimpse a life behind the camera. Sometimes the photographer – equipment and all – could be seen reflected in a mirror behind the performers. Sometimes the hand of a technician, or a fluffer – someone hired to keep the stars aroused between shots – would be caught on the edge of the frame, like the limb of a lover just exiled from the bed.

Such obvious errors were relatively rare. More frequent – and to William’s mind far more telling – were subtler signs of the reality behind the scene he was witnessing. The times when a performer, offered a multitude of sins and not certain which hole to pleasure next, glanced off camera for instruction; or when a leg was speedily shifted because the power behind the lens had yelled that it obscured the field of action.

At such times, when the fiction he was aroused by – which was not quite a fiction, because hard was hard, and could not be faked – William felt he understood Palomo Grove better. Something lived behind the life of the town, directing its daily processes with such selflessness no one but he knew it was there. And even he would forget. Months would go by, and he’d go about his business, which was real estate, forgetting the hidden hand. Then, like in the porno, he’d glimpse something. Maybe a look in the eye of one of the older residents, or a crack in the street, or water running down the Hill from an over-sprinkled lawn. Any of these were enough to make him remember the lake, and the League, and know that all the town seemed to be was a fiction (not quite a fiction, because flesh was flesh and could not be faked), and he was one of the performers in its strange story.

That story had proceeded without a drama to equal that of the League in the years since the sealing of the caves. Marked town though it was, the Grove prospered, and Witt with it. As Los Angeles grew in size and affluence towns out in the Simi Valley, the Grove amongst them, became dormitories for the metropolis. The price of the town’s real estate rose steeply in the late seventies, just about the time when William entered the business. It rose again, particularly in Windbluff, when several minor stars elected to take houses on the Hill, conferring on the locale a chic it had hitherto lacked. The biggest of the houses, a palatial residence with a panoramic view of the town, and the valley beyond, was bought by the comedian Buddy Vance, who at the time had the highest-rated TV show on any of the networks. A little lower down the hill the cowboy actor Raymond Cobb demolished a house and built on the spot his own sprawling ranch, complete with a pool in the shape of a sheriff’s badge. Between Vance’s house and Cobb’s lay a house entirely concealed by trees occupied by the silent star Helena Davis, who in her day had been the most gossiped-about actress in Hollywood. Now in her late seventies she was a complete recluse, which only fuelled rumours in the Grove whenever a young man appeared in town – always six foot, always blond – and declared himself a friend of Miss Davis. Their presence earned the house its nickname: Iniquity’s Den.

There were other imports from Los Angeles. A Health Club opened up in the Mall, and was quickly oversubscribed. The craze for Szechwan restaurants brought two such establishments, both sufficiently patronized to survive the competition. Style stores flourished, offering Deco, American Naive and simple kitsch. The demand for space was so heavy the Mall gained a second floor. Businesses which the Grove would never have supported in its early days were now indispensable. The pool supply store, the nail sculpture and tanning service, the karate school.

Once in a while, sitting waiting for a pedicure, or in the pet shop while the kids chose between three kinds of chinchilla, a newcomer might mention a rumour they’d heard about the town. Hadn’t something happened here, way back when? If there was a long-standing Grover in the vicinity the conversation would very quickly be steered into less controversial territory. Although a generation had grown up in the intervening years there was still a sense among the natives, as they liked to call themselves, that the League of Virgins was better forgotten.

There were some in the town, however, who would never be able to forget. William was one, of course. The others he still followed as they went about their lives. Joyce McGuire, a quiet, intensely religious woman who had brought up Tommy-Ray and Jo-Beth without the benefit of a husband. Her folks had moved to Florida some years back, leaving the house to their daughter and grandchildren. She was now virtually unseen beyond its walls. Hotchkiss, who had lost his wife to a lawyer from San Diego seventeen years her senior, and seemed never quite to have recovered from her desertion. The Farrell family, who had moved out of town to Thousand Oaks, only to find that their reputations had followed them. They’d eventually relocated to Louisiana, taking Arleen with them. She had never fully recovered. It was – William had heard – a good week if she strung more than ten words together. Jocelyn Farrell, her younger sister, had married and come back to live in Blue Spruce. He saw her on occasion, when she came to visit friends in town. The families were still very much part of the Grove’s history; yet though William was on nodding acquaintance with them all – the McGuires, Jim Hotchkiss, even Jocelyn Farrell – there was never a word exchanged between them.

There didn’t need to be. They all knew what they knew.

And knowing, lived in expectation.

II
i

The young man was virtually monochrome, his shoulder-length hair, which curled at his neck, black, his eyes as dark behind his round spectacles, his skin too white to be that of a Californian. His teeth were whiter still, though he seldom smiled. Didn’t do much speaking either, come to that. In company, he stammered.

Even the Pontiac Convertible he parked in the Mall was white, though its bodywork had been rusted by snow and salt from a dozen Chicago winters. It had got him across country, but there’d been a few close calls along the way. The time was coming when he was going to have to take it out into a field and shoot it. Meanwhile, if anyone needed evidence of a stranger in Palomo Grove they only had to cast their eye along the row of automobiles.

Or indeed, over him. He felt hopelessly out of place in his corduroys and his shabby jacket – (too long in the arms, too tight across the chest, like every jacket he’d ever bought). This was a town where they measured your worth by the name on your trainers. He didn’t wear trainers; he wore black leather lace-ups that he’d use day in, day out until they fell apart, whereupon he’d buy an identical pair. Out of place or not, he was here for a good reason, and the sooner he got about it the better he’d start feeling.

First, he needed directions. He selected a Frozen Yoghurt store as the emptiest along the row, and sauntered in. The welcome that met him from the other side of the counter was so warm he almost thought he’d been recognized.

‘Hi! How can I help you?’

‘I’m … new,’ he said. Dumb remark, he thought. ‘What I mean is, is there any place … any place I can buy a map?’

‘You mean of California?’

‘No. Palomo Grove,’ he said, keeping the sentences short. That way he stammered less.

The grin on the far side of the counter broadened.

‘Don’t need a map,’ it said. ‘The town’s not that big.’

‘OK. How about a hotel?’

‘Sure. Easy. There’s one real close. Or else there’s a new place, up in Stillbrook Village.’

‘Which is the cheapest?’

‘The Terrace. It’s just two minutes’ drive, round the back of the Mall.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

The smile he got in return said: everything’s perfect here. He could almost believe it too. The polished cars shone in the lot; the signs pointing him round to the back of the shopping centre gleamed; the motel facade – with another sign – Welcome to Palomo Grove, The Prosperous Haven – was as brightly painted as a Saturday morning cartoon. He was glad, when he’d secured a room, to pull down the blind against the daylight, and lurk a little.

The last stretch of the drive had left him weary, so he decided to perk his system up with some exercises and a shower. The machine, as he referred to his body, had been in a driver’s seat too long; it needed a working over. He warmed up with ten minutes of shadow sparrings, a combination of kicks and punches, followed by a favourite cocktail of specialized kicks: axe, jump crescent, spinning hook and jump spinning back kicks. As usual, what warmed up his muscles heated his mind. By the time he got to his leg-lifts and sit-ups he was ready to take on half of Palomo Grove to get an answer to the question he’d come here asking.

Which was: who is Howard Katz? Me wasn’t a good enough answer any more. Me was just the machine. He needed more information than that.

It was Wendy who’d asked the question, in that long night of debate which had ended in her leaving him.

‘I like you, Howie,’ she’d said. ‘But I can’t love you. And you know why? Because I don’t know you.’

‘You know what I am?’ Howie had replied. ‘A man with a hole in his middle.’

‘That’s a weird way to put it.’

‘It’s a weird way to feel.’

Weird, but true. Where others had some sense of themselves as people – ambition, opinion, religion – he just had this pitiful unfixedness. Those who liked him – Wendy, Richie, Lem – were patient with him. They waited through his stumblings and stammerings to hear what he had to say, and seemed to find some value in his comments. (You’re my holy fool, Lem had once told Howie; a remark which Howie was still pondering.) But to the rest of the world he was Katz the klutz. They didn’t bait him openly – he was too fit to be taken on hand to hand, even by heavyweights – but he knew what they said behind his back, and it always amounted to the same thing: Katz had a piece missing.

That Wendy had finally given up on him was too much to bear. Too hurt to show his face he’d brooded on the conversation for the best part of a week. Suddenly, the solution came clear. If there was any place on earth he’d understand the how and why of himself it was surely the town where he’d been born.

He raised the blind and looked out at the light. It was pearly; the air sweet-smelling. He couldn’t imagine why his mother would ever have left this pretty place for the bitter winter winds and smothering summers of Chicago. Now that she was dead (suddenly, in her sleep) he would have to solve that mystery for himself; and perhaps, in its solving, fill the hole that haunted the machine.

Just as she reached the front room, Momma called down from her room, her timing as faultless as ever.

‘Jo-Beth? Are you there? Jo-Beth?’

Always the same falling note in the voice, that seemed to warn: be loving to me now because I may not be here tomorrow. Perhaps not even the next hour.

‘Honey, are you still there?’

‘You know I am, Momma.’

‘Can I have a word?’

‘I’m late for work.’

‘Just a minute. Please. What’s a minute?’

‘I’m coming. Don’t get upset. I’m coming.’

Jo-Beth started upstairs. How many times a day did she cover this route? Her life was being counted out in stairs climbed and descended, climbed and descended.

‘What is it, Momma?’

Joyce McGuire lay in her usual position: on the sofa beside the open window, a pillow beneath her head. She didn’t look sick; but most of the time she was. The specialists came, and looked, and charged their fees, and left again shrugging. Nothing wrong physically, they said. Sound heart, sound lungs, sound spine. It’s between her ears she’s not so well. But that was news Momma didn’t want to hear. Momma had once known a girl who’d gone mad, and been hospitalized, and never come out again. That made her more afraid of madness than of anything. She wouldn’t have the word spoken in the house.

‘Will you have the Pastor call me?’ Joyce said. ‘Maybe he’ll come over tonight.’

‘He’s a very busy man, Momma.’

‘Not too busy for me,’ Joyce said. She was in her thirty-ninth year but she behaved like a woman twice that age. The slow way she raised her head from the pillow as if every inch was a triumph over gravity; the fluttering hands and eyelids; that perpetual sigh in her voice. She had cast herself as a movie consumptive, and would not be dissuaded from the role by mere medical opinion. She dressed for the role, in sickroom pastels; she let her hair, which was a rich brunette, grow long, not caring to fashion it or pin it up. She wore no trace of make-up, which further enhanced the impression of a woman tottering on the tip of the abyss. All in all, Jo-Beth was glad Momma no longer went out in public. People would talk. But that left her here, in the house, calling her daughter up and down the stairs. Up and down, up and down.

When, as now, Jo-Beth’s irritation reached screaming pitch she reminded herself that her mother had her reasons for this withdrawal. Life hadn’t been easy for an unmarried woman bringing up her children in a town as judgemental as the Grove. She’d earned her malady in censure and humiliation.

‘I’ll get Pastor John to call,’ Jo-Beth said. ‘Now listen, Momma, I’ve got to go.’

‘I know, honey, I know.’

Jo-Beth returned to the door, but Joyce called after her.

‘No kiss?’ she said.

‘Momma –’

‘You never miss kissing me.’

Dutifully Jo-Beth went back to the window, and kissed her mother on the cheek.

‘You take care,’ Joyce said.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I don’t like you working late.’

‘This is not New York, Momma.’

Joyce’s eyes flickered towards the window, from which she watched the world go by.

‘Makes no difference,’ she said, the lightness going from her voice. ‘There’s no place safe.’

It was a familiar speech. Jo-Beth had been hearing it, in one version or another, since childhood. Talk of the world as a Valley of Death, haunted by faces capable of unspeakable malice. That was the chief comfort Pastor John gave Momma. They agreed on the presence of the Devil in the world; in Palomo Grove.

‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ Jo-Beth said.

‘I love you, honey.’

‘I love you too. Momma.’

Jo-Beth closed the door and started downstairs.

‘Is she asleep?’

Tommy-Ray was at the foot of the flight.

‘No. She’s not.’

‘Damn.’

‘You should go in and see her.’

‘I know I should. Only she’s going to give me a hard time about Wednesday.’

‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘Hard liquor, she kept saying. True?’

‘What do you think? If we’d been brought up like normal kids, with liquor around the house, it wouldn’t go to my head.’

‘So it’s her fault you got drunk?’

‘You’ve got a downer on me, too, haven’t you? Shit. Everybody’s got a downer on me.’

Jo-Beth smiled, and put her arms around her brother. ‘No, Tommy, they haven’t. They all think you’re wonderful and you know it.’

‘You too?’

‘Me too.’

She kissed him, lightly, then went to the mirror to check her appearance.

‘Pretty as a picture,’ he said, coming to stand beside her. ‘Both of us.’

‘Your ego,’ she said. ‘It’s getting worse.’

‘That’s why you love me,’ he said, gazing at their twin reflections. ‘Am I growing more like you or you like me?’

‘Neither.’

‘Ever seen two faces more alike?’

She smiled. There was an extraordinary resemblance between them. A delicacy in Tommy-Ray’s bones matched by clarity in hers which had both of them idolized. She liked nothing better than to walk out hand in hand with her brother, knowing she had beside her a companion as attractive as any girl could wish, and knowing he felt the same. Even amongst the forced beauties of the Venice boardwalk they turned heads.

But in the last few months they hadn’t gone out together. She’d been working long hours at the Steak House, and he’d been out with his pals amongst the beach crowd: Sean, Andy and the rest. She missed the contact.

‘Have you been feeling weird these last couple of days?’ he asked, out of nowhere.

‘What kind of funny?’

‘I don’t know. Probably just me. Only I feel like everything’s coming to an end.’

‘It’s almost summer. Everything’s just beginning.’

‘Yeah, I know … but Andy’s gone off to college, so fuck him. Sean’s got this girl in LA, and he’s real private with her. I don’t know. I’m left here waiting, and I don’t know what for.’

‘So don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Wait. Take off somewhere.’

‘I want to. But …’ He studied her face in the mirror. ‘Is it true? You don’t feel … strange?’

She returned his look, not certain she wanted to admit to the dreams she’d been having, in which she was being carried by the tide, and all her life was waving to her from the shore. But if not to Tommy, whom she loved and trusted more than any creature alive, to whom?

‘OK. I admit it,’ she said, ‘I do feel something.’

‘What?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m waiting too.’

‘Do you know what for?’

‘Nope.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Don’t we make a pair?’

She reran the conversation with Tommy as she drove down to the Mall. He had, as usual, articulated their shared feelings. The last few weeks had been charged with anticipation. Something was going to happen soon. Her dreams knew it. Her bones knew it. She only hoped it was not delayed, because she was coming to the point, with Momma and the Grove, and the job at the Steak House, when she would lose her cool completely. It was a race now, between the fuse on her patience and the something on the horizon. If it hadn’t come by summer, she thought (whatever it was, however unlikely), then she’d up and go looking for it.

ii

Nobody seemed to walk much in this town, Howie noticed. On his three-quarter-hour stroll up and back down the Hill he encountered only five pedestrians, and they all had children or dogs in tow to justify their waywardness. Short though this initial journey was it took him to a fair vantage point from which to grasp something of the town’s lay-out. It also sharpened his appetite.

Beef for the desperado, he thought, and selected Butrick’s Steak House from the eating places available in the Mall. It was not large, and not more than half full. He took a table at the window, opened the tattered copy of Hesse’s Siddhartha, and continued his struggle with the text, which was in the original German. The book had belonged to his mother, who had read and re-read it many times – though he could not remember her so much as uttering a word of the language she was apparently fluent in. He was not. Reading the book was like an interior stuttering; he fought for the sense, catching it only to lose it again.

‘Something to drink?’ the waitress asked him.

He was about to say ‘Coke’ when his life changed.

Jo-Beth stepped over the threshold of Butrick’s the way she had three nights a week for the last seven months, but tonight it was as if every other time had been a rehearsal for this stepping; this turning; this meeting of eyes with the young man sitting at table five. She took him in with a glance. His mouth was half open. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. There was a book in his hand. Its owner’s name she didn’t know, couldn’t know. She’d never set eyes on him before. Yet he watched her with the same recognition she knew was on her own face.

It was like being born, he thought, seeing this face. Like coming out of a safe place into an adventure that would take his breath away. There was nothing more beautiful in all the world than the soft curve of her lips as she smiled at him.

And smiling now, like a perfect flirt. Stop it, she told herself, look away! He’ll think you’re out of your mind staring. But then he’s staring too, isn’t he?

I’ll keep looking – as long as she keeps looking

– as long as he keeps looking –

‘Jo-Beth!’

The summons came from the kitchen. She blinked.

‘Did you say a Coke?’ the waitress asked him.

Jo-Beth glanced towards the kitchen – Murray was calling her, she had to go – then back at the boy with the book. He still had his eyes fixed on her.

‘Yes,’ she saw him say.

The word was for her, she knew. Yes, go, he said, I’ll still be here.

She nodded, and went.

The whole encounter occupied maybe five seconds, but it left them both trembling.

In the kitchen Murray was his usual martyred self.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Two minutes late, Murray.’

‘I make it ten. There’s a party of three in the corner. It’s your table.’

‘I’m putting my apron on.’

‘Hurry.’

Howie watched the kitchen door for her re-emergence, Siddhartha forgotten. When she appeared she didn’t look his way but went to serve a table on the far side of the restaurant. He wasn’t distressed that she failed to look. An understanding had been reached between them in that first exchange of gazes. He would wait all night if need be, and all through tomorrow if that was what it took, until she had finished her work and looked at him again.

In the darkness below Palomo Grove the inspirers of these children still held on to each other as they had when they’d first fallen to earth, neither willing to risk the other’s freedom. Even when they’d risen to touch the bathers, they’d gone together, like twins joined at the hip. Fletcher had been slow comprehending the Jaff’s intention that day. He’d thought the man planned to draw his wretched terata out of the girls. But his mischief had been more ambitious than that. It was the making of children he was about, and, squalid as it was, Fletcher had been obliged to do the same. He was not proud of his assault. As news of its consequences had reached them his shame had deepened. Once, sitting by a window with Raul, he had dreamed of being sky. Instead his war with the Jaff had reduced him to a spoiler of innocents, whose futures they had blighted with touch. The Jaff had taken no little pleasure in Fletcher’s distress. Many times, as the years in darkness passed, Fletcher would sense his enemy’s thoughts turning to the children they’d made, and wondering which would come first to save their true father.

Time did not mean to them what it had meant before the Nuncio. They didn’t hunger, nor did they sleep. Buried together like lovers, they waited in the rock. Sometimes they could hear voices from the overground, echoing down passages opened by the subtle but perpetual grinding of the earth. But these snatches offered no clue to the progress of their children, with whom their mental links were at best tenuous. Or at least had been, until tonight.

Tonight their offspring had met, and contact was suddenly clear, as though their children had understood something of their own natures, seeing their perfect opposites, and had unwittingly opened their minds to the creators. Fletcher found himself in the head of a youth called Howard, the son of Trudi Katz. Through the boy’s eyes he saw his enemy’s child just as the Jaff saw Howie from his daughter’s head.

This was the moment they’d waited for. The war they’d fought half way across America had exhausted them both. But their children were in the world to fight for them now; to finish the battle that had been left unresolved for two decades. This time, it would be to the death.

Or so they’d expected. Now, for the first time in their lives, Fletcher and the Jaff shared the same pain – like a single spike thrust through both their souls.

This was not war, damn it. This was nothing like war.

‘Lost your appetite?’ the waitress wanted to know.

‘Guess I have,’ Howie replied.

‘You want me to take it away?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You want coffee? Dessert?’

‘Another Coke.’

‘One Coke.’

Jo-Beth was in the kitchen when Beverly came through with the plate.

‘Waste of good steak,’ Beverly said.

‘What’s his name?’ Jo-Beth wanted to know.

‘What am I, a dating service? I didn’t ask.’

‘Go ask.’

‘You ask. He wants another Coke.’

‘Thanks. Will you look after my table?’

‘Just call me Cupid.’

Jo-Beth had managed to keep her mind on her job and her eyes off the boy for half an hour: enough was enough. She poured a Coke, and took it out. To her horror, the table was empty. She almost dropped the glass; the sight of the empty chair made her feel physically sick. Then, out of the corner of her eye, the sight of him emerging from the rest-room, and returning to the table. He saw her, and smiled. She crossed to the table, ignoring two calls for service en route. She already knew the question she was going to ask first: it had been on her mind from the start. But he was there with the same enquiry before her.

‘Do we know each other?’

And of course she knew the answer.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Only when you … you … you …’ He was stumbling over the word, the muscles in his jaw working like he was chewing gum. ‘…. You …,’ he kept saying, ‘… you…’

‘I thought the same,’ she said, hoping her finishing his thought wouldn’t offend. It seemed not to. He gave a smile, his face relaxing.

‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘You’re not from the Grove, are you?’

‘No. Chicago.’

‘That’s a ways to come.’

‘I was born here, though.’

‘You were?’

‘My name’s Howard Katz. Howie.’

‘I’m Jo-Beth …’

‘What time do you finish here?’

‘Around eleven. It’s good you came in tonight. I’m only here Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. If you’d come in tomorrow you would have missed me.’

‘We’d have found each other,’ he said, and the certainty in his statement made her want to cry.

‘I have to go back to work,’ she told him.

‘I’ll wait,’ he replied.

At eleven-ten they stepped out of Butrick’s together. The night was warm. Not a pleasant, breezy warmth, but humid.

‘Why did you come to the Grove?’ she asked him as they walked to her car.

‘To meet you.’

She laughed.

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘All right. So why did you leave in the first place?’

‘My mother moved us to Chicago when I was only a few weeks old. She never really spoke much about the ol’ home town. When she did it was like she was talking about hell. I suppose I wanted to see for myself. Maybe understand her and me a bit better.’

‘Is she still in Chicago?’

‘She’s dead. Died two years ago.’

‘That’s sad. What about your father?’

‘I don’t have one. Well … I mean … is … is –’ He started to stumble, fought it, and won. ‘I never knew him,’ he said.

‘This gets weirder.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the same for me. I don’t know who my father is either.’

‘Doesn’t matter much, does it?’

‘It used to. Less now. I’ve got a twin, see? Tommy-Ray. He’s always been there for me. You must meet Tommy. You’ll love him. Everybody does.’

‘And you. I bet every … every … everybody loves you too.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You’re beautiful. I’m going to be competing with half the guys in Ventura County, right?’

‘Nope.’

‘Don’t believe you.’

‘Oh they look. But they don’t touch.’

‘Me included?’

She stopped walking. ‘I don’t know you, Howie. At least, I do and I don’t. Like when I saw you in the Steak House, I recognized you from somewhere. Except that I’ve never been to Chicago and you’ve not been in the Grove since –’ She suddenly frowned. ‘How old are you?’ she said.

‘Eighteen last April.’

Her frown deepened.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Me too.’

‘Huh?’

‘Eighteen last April. The fourteenth.’

‘I’m on the second.’

‘This is getting very strange, don’t you think? Me thinking I knew you. You thinking the same.’

‘It makes you uneasy.’

‘Am I that obvious?’

‘Yes. I never saw … saw … I never saw a face so … transparent. Makes me want to kiss it.’

In the rock, the spirits writhed. Every word of seduction they’d heard had been a twisting of the blade. But they were powerless to prevent the exchange. All they could do was sit in their children’s heads and listen.

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

They shuddered.

Howie put his hand on her face.

– They shuddered ’til the ground around them shook. –

She took a half step towards him and put her smiling lips on his.

– ’Til cracks opened up in the concrete that eighteen years before had sealed them up. Enough! they screamed in their children’s ears, enough! Enough!

‘Did you feel something?’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think the earth moved.’

III
i

The girls went down to the water twice.

The second time was the morning after the night on which Howard Ralph Katz met Jo-Beth McGuire. A bright morning, the muggy air of the evening before blown away on a wind that promised cool gusts to mellow the heat of the afternoon.

Buddy Vance had slept alone again, up in that bed he’d had built for three. Three in a bed – he’d said (and unfortunately been quoted saying) – was hog-heaven. Two was marriage; and hell. He’d had enough of that to be certain it didn’t suit him but it would have made a morning as fine as this finer still to have known there was a woman waiting at the end of it, even if she was a wife. His affair with Ellen had proved too perverse to last; he would have to dismiss her from his employ very soon. Meanwhile his empty bed made this new early morning regime a little easier. With nothing to seduce him back to the mattress it wasn’t so difficult to put on his jogging gear and take the road down the Hill.

Buddy was fifty-four. Jogging made him feel twice that. But too many of his contemporaries had died on him of late, his sometime agent Stanley Goldhammer being the most recent departure, and they’d all died of the same excesses that he was still thoroughly addicted to. The cigars, the booze, the dope. Of all his vices women were the healthiest, but even they were a pleasure to be taken in moderation these days. He couldn’t make love through the night the way he’d been able to in his thirties. On a few traumatic occasions recently he hadn’t been able to perform at all. It had been that failure which had sent him to his doctor, demanding a panacea, whatever the price.

‘There isn’t one,’ Tharp had said. He’d been treating Buddy since the TV years, when The Buddy Vance Show had topped the ratings every week, and a joke he told at eight at night would be on the lips of every American the following morning. Tharp knew the man once billed as the funniest man in the world inside out.

‘You’re doing your body harm, Buddy, every damn day. And you say you don’t want to die. You still want to be playing Vegas at a hundred.’

‘Right.’

‘On present progress, I give you another ten years. That’s if you’re lucky. You’re overweight, you’re over-stressed. I’ve seen healthier corpses.’

‘I do the gags, Lou.’

‘Yeah, and I fill in the death certificates. So start taking care of yourself, for Christ’s sake, or you’re going to go the way Stanley went.’

‘You think I don’t think about that?’

‘I know you do. Bud. I know.’

Tharp stood up and walked round to Buddy’s side of the desk. On the wall were signed photographs of the stars whom he’d advised and treated. So many great names. Most of them dead; too many of them prematurely. Fame had its price.

‘I’m glad you’re coming to your senses. If you’re really serious about this …’

‘I’m here aren’t I? How much more fucking serious do I have to get? You know how I hate talking about this shit. I never did a death gag in my life, Lou. You know that? Not once. Anything else. Anything. But not that!’

‘It’s got to be faced sooner or later.’

‘I’ll take later.’

‘OK, so I’ll have a health plan drawn up for you. Diet; exercise; the works. But I’m telling you now, Buddy, it won’t make pleasant reading!’

‘I heard somewhere: laughter makes you live longer.’

‘Show me where it says comedians live forever, I’ll show you a tomb with a quip on it.’

‘Yeah. So when do I begin?’

‘Start today. Throw out the malts and the nose-candy, and try using that pool of yours once in a while.’

‘It needs cleaning.’

‘So get it cleaned.’

That was the easy part. Buddy had Ellen call the Pool Service as soon as he got home and they sent somebody up the following day. The health plan, as Tharp had warned, was a tougher call, but whenever his will faltered he thought of the way he looked in the mirror some mornings, and the fact that his dick was only visible if he held his gut in so hard it ached. When vanity failed he thought of death, but only as a last resort.

He’d always been an early riser, so getting up for a morning run wasn’t a great chore. The sidewalks were empty, and often – as today – he’d make his way down the Hill and through the East Grove to the woods, where the ground didn’t bruise the soles the same way the concrete did, and his panting was set to birdsong. On such days the run was strictly a one-way journey; he’d have Jose Luis bring the limo down the Hill and meet him when he emerged from the woods, the car stocked with towels and iced tea. Then they’d head back up to Coney Eye, as he’d dubbed the estate, the easy way: on wheels. Health was one thing; masochism, at least in public, quite another.

The run had other benefits besides firming up his belly. He had an hour or so alone to get to grips with anything that was troubling him. Today, inevitably, his thoughts were of Rochelle. The divorce settlement would be finalized this week, and his sixth marriage would be history. It would be the second shortest of the six. His forty-two days with Shashi had been the fastest, ending with a shot that had come so close to blowing off his balls his sweat ran cold whenever he thought of it. Not that he’d spent more than a month with Rochelle in the year they’d been married. After the honeymoon, and its little surprises, she’d taken herself back to Fort Worth to calculate her alimony. It had been a mismatch from the beginning. He should have realized that, the first time she failed to laugh at his routine, which was, coincidentally, the first time she heard his routine. But of all his wives, including Elizabeth, she was the most physically alluring. Stone-faced she’d been, but the sculptor had genius.

He was thinking of her face as he came off the sidewalk and hit the woods. Maybe he should call her; ask her to come back to Coney for one final try. He’d done it before, with Diane, and they’d had the best two months of their years together, before the old resentments had set in afresh. But that had been Diane, this was Rochelle. It was useless attempting to project behaviour patterns from one woman to the next. They were all so gloriously different. Men were a dull bunch by comparison: dowdy and mono-minded. Next time round he wanted to be born a lesbian.

Off in the distance, he heard laughter; the unmistakable giggling of young girls. A strange sound to hear so early in the morning. He stopped running and listened for it again, but the air was suddenly empty of all other sounds, even birdsong. The only noises he could hear were internal: the labourings of his system. Had he imagined the laughter? It was perfectly possible, his thoughts being as full of women as they were. But as he prepared to about-turn and leave the thicket to its songlessness, the giggling came again, and with it an odd, almost hallucinatory, change in the scene around him. The sound seemed to animate the entire wood. It brought movement to the leaves, it brightened the sunlight. More than that: it changed the very direction of the sun. In the silence, the light had been pallid, its source still low in the east. On the cue of laughter it became noon-day bright, pouring down on the upturned faces of the leaves.

Buddy neither believed nor disbelieved his eyes: he simply stood before the experience as before feminine beauty, mesmerized. Only when the third round of laughter began did he grasp its direction, and start off at a run towards it, the light still vacillating.

A few yards on he saw a movement ahead of him through the trees. Bare skin. A girl stripping off her underwear. Beyond her was another girl, this one blonde, and strikingly attractive, beginning to do the same. He knew instinctively they weren’t quite real, but he still advanced cautiously, for fear of startling them. Could illusions be startled? He didn’t want to risk it; not with such pretty sights to see. The blonde girl was the last one undressed. There were three others, he counted, already wading out into a lake that flickered on the rim of solidity. Its ripples threw light up on to the blonde’s face – Arleen, they named her, as they shouted back to the shore. Advancing from tree to tree, he got to within ten feet of the lake’s edge. Arleen was in up to her thighs now. Though she bent to cup water in her hands and splash it on her body it was virtually invisible. The girls who were in deeper than she, and swimming, seemed to be floating in mid-air.

Ghosts, he half-thought; these are ghosts. I’m spying on the past, being re-run in front of me. The thought propelled him from hiding. If his assumption was correct then they might vanish at any moment and he wanted to drink their glory down in gulps before they did.

There was no trace of the clothes they’d shed in the grass where he stood, nor any sign – when one or other of them glanced back towards the shore – that they saw him there.

‘Don’t go too far,’ one of the quartet yelled to her companion. The advice was ignored. The girl was moving further from the shore, her legs spreading and closing, spreading and closing as she swam. Not since the first wet dreams of his adolescence could he remember an experience as erotic as this, watching these creatures suspended in the gleaming air, their lower bodies subtly blurred by the element that bore them up, but not so much he could not enjoy their every detail.

‘Warm!’ yelled the adventurer, who was treading water a good distance from him, ‘it’s warm out here.’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Come and feel!’

Her words inspired further ambition in Buddy. He’d seen so much. Dared he now touch? If they couldn’t see him – and they plainly couldn’t – where was the harm in getting so close he could run his fingertips along their spines?

The water made no sound as he stepped into the lake; nor did he feel so much as a touch against his ankles and shins as he waded deeper. It buoyed Arleen up well enough however. She was floating on the lake’s surface, her hair spread around her head, her gentle strokes taking her further from him. He hurried in pursuit, the water no brake upon him, halving the distance between himself and the girl in seconds. His arms were extended, his eyes fixed upon the pinkness of her labia as she kicked away from him.

The adventurer had begun to shout something, but he ignored her agitation. To touch Arleen was all he could think about. To put his hand upon her and she not protest, but go on swimming, while he had his way. In his haste his foot snagged on something. Arms still reaching for the girl he fell, face down. The jolt brought him to his senses enough to interpret the shouts from the deeper water. They were no longer cries of pleasure, but of alarm. He raised his head from the ground. The two furthest swimmers were struggling in mid-air, turning their faces up to the sky.

‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.

They were drowning. Ghosts, he’d called them moments ago, not really thinking about what that name implied. Here was the sickening truth. The swimming party had come to grief in these phantom waters. He’d been ogling the dead.

Revolted with himself, he wanted to retreat, but a perverse obligation to this tragedy kept him watching.

All four of them were caught up in the same turmoil now, thrashing in the air, their faces darkening as they fought for breath. How was it possible? They looked to be drowning in four or five feet of water. Had some current taken hold of them? It seemed unlikely, in water so shallow and so apparently placid.

‘Help them …’ he found himself saying. ‘Why doesn’t somebody help them?’

As though he might lend aid himself he started towards them. Arleen was closest to him. All the beauty had gone from her face. It was contorted by desperation and terror. Suddenly her wide eyes seemed to see something in the water beneath her feet. Her struggling ceased, and a look of utter surrender took its place. She was giving up life.

‘Don’t,’ Buddy murmured, reaching for her as if his arms might lift her up out of the past and carry her back to life. At the very moment his flesh met that of the girl, he knew this was fatal business for them both. He was too late in his regrets, however. The ground beneath them trembled. He looked down. There was only a thin cover of earth there, he saw, sustaining a meagre crop of grass. Beneath the earth, grey rock; or was it concrete? Yes! Concrete! A hole in the ground had been plugged here, but the seal was fracturing in front of him, cracks widening in the concrete.

He looked back towards the edge of the lake, and solid ground, but a rift had already opened between him and safety, a slab of concrete sliding into it a yard from his toes. Icy air rose from underground.

He looked back towards the swimmers, but the mirage was receding. As it went he caught the same look on all the four faces, eyes rolled up so they showed solid white, mouths open to drink death down. They hadn’t perished in shallow water, he now understood. This had been a pit when they’d come swimming here, and it had claimed them as it was now claiming him: them with water, him with wraiths.

He started to howl for help, as the violence in the ground mounted, the concrete grinding itself to dust between his feet. Perhaps some other early-morning jogger would hear him, and come to his aid. But quickly; it had to be quickly.

Who was he kidding? And he, a kidder. Nobody was going to come. He was going to die. For fuck’s sake, he was going to die.

The rift between him and good ground had widened considerably, but leaping it was his only hope for salvation. He had to be fast, before the concrete beneath him slid into the pit, taking him with it. It was now or never.

He jumped. It was a good jump too. Another few inches and he’d have made it to safety. But a few were everything. He snatched at the air, short of his target, and fell.

One moment the sun was still shining on the top of his head. The next, darkness, icy darkness, and he was plummeting through it with cobs of concrete hurtling past him on the same downward journey. He heard them crack against the face of the rock as they went; then realized it was he who was making the noise. It was the breaking of his bones and back he could hear as he fell. And fell and fell.

ii

The day began earlier for Howie than he’d ordinarily have welcomed after sleeping so little, but once he was up and exercising he felt good about being awake. It was a crime to lie in bed on a morning so fine. He bought himself a soda from the machine and sat at the window, gazing at the sky and musing on what the day might bring.

Liar; not of the day at all. Of Jo-Beth; only of Jo-Beth. Her eyes, her smile, her voice, her skin, her scent, her secrets. He watched the sky, and saw her, and was obsessed.

This was a first for him. He’d never felt an emotion as strong as that possessing him now. Twice in the night he’d woken in a sudden sweat. He couldn’t remember the dreams that had brought it on, but she was in them, for certain. How could she not be? He had to go find her. Every hour he spent out of her company was a wasted hour; every moment not seeing her he was blind; every moment not touching her, numb.

She’d told him, as they’d parted the previous night, that she worked at Butrick’s during the evening, and at a book store during the day. Given the size of the Mall, it wouldn’t be too difficult to locate her work place. He picked up a bag of doughnuts to fill the hole not eating the previous night had left. That other hole, the one he’d come here to heal, was very far from his thoughts. He wandered along the rows of businesses, looking for her store. He found it, between a dog-grooming service and a real estate office. Like many of the stores, it was still closed, opening time, according to the sign on the door, still three quarters of an hour off. He sat down in the steadily warming sun, and ate, and waited.

Her instinct, from the moment she’d opened her eyes, was to forget about work today, and go find Howie. The events of the previous night had run and re-run in her dreams, changed each time in some subtle way, as though they might be alternative realities, a few of an infinite selection born from the same encounter. But among such possibilities she could conceive of none that did not contain him. He had been there, waiting for her, from her first breath; her cells were certain of it. In some imponderable way she and Howie belonged together.

She knew very well that if any of her friends had confessed such sentiments she’d have politely dismissed them as ludicrous. That was not to say she’d not moped over a few faces, of course; turned up the radio when a particular love song was played. But even as she’d listened she’d known it was all a distraction from an unmelodious reality. She saw a perfect victim of that reality every day of her life. Her mother, living like a prisoner – both of the house, and of the past – talking, on those days when she could muster the will to talk, of hopes she’d had, and the friends she’d shared them with. Until now that sad sight had kept Jo-Beth’s romantic ambitions, indeed any ambition, in check.

But what had happened between herself and the Chicago boy would not end the way her mother’s one great affair had ended, with her deserted, and the man in question so despised she could not bring herself to name him. If all the Sunday teachings she’d dutifully attended had instructed her in anything, it was that revelation came when and where least expected. To Joseph Smith, on a farm in Palmyra, New York; news of the Book of Mormon, revealed to him by an angel. Why not to her then, in circumstances no more promising? Stepping into Butrick’s Steak House; standing in a parking lot with a man she knew from everywhere and nowhere?

Tommy-Ray was in the kitchen, his perusal as sharp as the scent of the coffee he was brewing. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes.

‘Late night?’ she said.

‘For both of us.’

‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘I was home before midnight.’

‘You didn’t sleep though.’

‘On and off.’

‘You stayed awake. I heard you.’

That was unlikely, she knew. Their bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house, and his route to the bathroom didn’t take him within earshot of her.

‘So?’ he said.

‘So what?’

‘Talk to me.’

‘Tommy?’ There was an agitation in his demeanour that unnerved her. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I heard you,’ he said again. ‘I kept hearing you, all through the night. Something happened to you last night. Didn’t it?’

He couldn’t know about Howie. Only Beverly had any clue as to what had gone on at the Steak House, and she wouldn’t have had time to spread rumours, even if she’d had a mind to, which was doubtful. She had enough secrets of her own to keep from the vine. Besides, what was there to tell? That she’d made eyes at a diner? Kissed him in the parking lot? What did any of that matter to Tommy-Ray?

‘Something happened last night,’ he was still saying. ‘I felt some kind of change. But whatever we were waiting for … it didn’t come to me. So it must have come to you, Jo-Beth. Whatever it is, it came to you.’

‘Want to pour me some of that coffee?’

‘Answer me.’

‘What’s to answer?’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re lying,’ he remarked, with more bafflement than accusation. ‘Why are you lying to me?’

It was a reasonable question. She wasn’t ashamed of Howie, or what she felt for him. She’d shared every victory and defeat of her eighteen years with Tommy-Ray. He wouldn’t go blabbing this secret to Momma or Pastor John. But the looks he kept giving her were odd; she couldn’t read them aright. And there was that talk of hearing her through the night. Had he been listening at her door?

‘I have to get down to the store,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll be real late.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘The ride.’

‘Tommy …’

He smiled at her. ‘What’s wrong with giving your brother a ride?’ he said. She was almost taken in by the performance, until she nodded her acquiescence and caught the smile dropping from his lips.

‘We have to trust each other,’ he said, once they were in the car and moving. ‘Like we always have.’

‘I know that.’

‘Because we’re strong together, right?’ He was staring through the window, glassy-eyed. ‘And right now I need to feel strong.’

‘You need to get some sleep. Why don’t you let me drive you back? It doesn’t matter if I’m late.’

He shook his head. ‘Hate that house,’ he said.

‘What a thing to say.’

‘It’s true. We both hate it. It gives me bad dreams.’

‘It’s not the house, Tommy.’

‘Yes, it is. The house, and Momma, and being in this fucking town! Look at it!’ Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was raging. ‘Look at this shit! Don’t you want to tear the whole fucking place apart?’ His volume was nerve-shredding in the confines of the car. ‘I know you do,’ he said, staring at her, eyes now wild and wide. ‘Don’t lie to me, little sister.’

‘I’m not your little sister, Tommy,’ she said.

‘I’m thirty-five seconds older,’ he said. This had always been a joke between them. Suddenly it was power-play. ‘Thirty-five seconds more in this shit-hole.’

‘Stop talking stupid,’ she said, bringing the car to a sudden halt. ‘I’m not listening to this. You can get out and walk.’

‘You want me shouting in the street?’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. Don’t think I won’t. I’ll scream ’til their fucking houses fall down!’

‘You’re behaving like an asshole,’ she said.

‘Well, there’s a word I don’t hear from my little sister’s lips too often,’ he said, with smug satisfaction. ‘Something’s got into both of us this morning.’

He was right. She found his rage igniting her in a way she’d never allowed it to before. Twins they were, and in so many ways similar, but he had always been the more openly rebellious of the two. She had played the quiescent daughter, concealing the contempt she’d felt for the Grove’s hypocrisies because Momma, so much its victim, still needed its approval. But there were times when she’d envied Tommy-Ray’s open contempt, and longed to spit in the eye of propriety the way he had, knowing he’d be forgiven his trespasses upon payment of a smile. He’d had it easy, all those years. His tirade against the town was narcissism; he was in love with himself as rebel. And it was spoiling a morning she’d wanted to luxuriate in.

‘We’ll talk tonight, Tommy,’ she said.

‘Will we?’

‘I just said we would.’

‘We have to help each other.’

‘I know.’

‘Especially now.’

He was suddenly hushed, as though all the rage had gone from him in a single breath, and with it all his energy.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, very quietly.

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Tommy. You’re just tired. You should go home and sleep.’

‘Yeah.’

They were at the Mall. She didn’t bother to park the car. ‘Take it home,’ she said. ‘Lois will run me back this evening.’

As she went to get out of the car he took hold of her arm, his fingers gripping her so hard it hurt.

‘Tommy –’ she said.

‘You really mean it?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of?’

‘No,’ she said.

He leaned over to kiss her.

‘I trust you,’ he said, his lips very close to hers. His face filled her sight; his hand held her arm as though he possessed her.

‘Enough, Tommy,’ she said, pulling her arm free. ‘Go home.’

She got out, slamming rather than closing the car door, deliberately not looking back at him.

‘Jo-Beth.’

Ahead of her, Howie. Her stomach flipped at the sight of him. Behind her, she heard a car-horn blare, and glanced back to see that Tommy-Ray had not taken the wheel of the car, which was blocking access for several other vehicles. He was staring at her; reaching for the handle of the door; getting out. The horns multiplied. Somebody began to shout at him to get out of the way, but he ignored them. His attention was fixed upon Jo-Beth. It was too late for her to signal Howie away. The look on Tommy-Ray’s face made it plain he’d understood the whole story from the smile of welcome on Howie’s face.

She looked back at Howie, feeling an ashen despair.

‘Well lookee here,’ she heard Tommy-Ray say behind her.

It was more than despair; it was fear.

‘Howie –’ she began.

‘Christ, was I dumb,’ Tommy-Ray went on.

She tried a smile as she turned back to him. ‘Tommy,’ she said, ‘I want you to meet Howie.’

She’d never seen a look on Tommy-Ray’s face the like of the look she was witnessing now; hadn’t known those idolized features capable of such malice.

‘Howie?’ he said. ‘As in Howard?’

She nodded, glancing back at Howie. ‘I’d like you to meet my brother,’ she said. ‘My twin brother. Howie, this is Tommy-Ray.’

Both men stepped forward to shake hands, bringing them into her vision at the same time. The sun shone with equal strength on both, but it didn’t flatter Tommy-Ray, despite his tan. He looked sickly beneath the veneer of health he wore; his eyes sunk without a gleam, his skin too tightly drawn over his cheeks and temples. He looks dead, she found herself thinking. Tommy-Ray looks dead.

Though Howie extended his hand to be shaken Tommy-Ray ignored it, suddenly turning to his sister.

‘Later,’ he said, so softly.

His murmur was almost drowned out by the din of complaints from behind him but she caught its menace clearly enough. Having spoken he turned his back and returned to the car. She couldn’t see the mollifying smile he was putting on, but she could imagine it. Mr Golden, raising his arms in mock-surrender, knowing his captors didn’t have a hope.

‘What was that about?’ Howie said.

‘I don’t exactly know. He’s been odd since –’

She was going to say since yesterday, but she’d seen a canker in his beauty moments ago that must have been there always, except that she – like the rest of the world – had been too dazzled to recognize it.

‘Does he need help?’ Howie asked.

‘I think it’s better we let him go.’

‘Jo-Beth!’ somebody called. A middle-aged woman was striding towards them, both dress and features plain to the point of severity.

‘Was that Tommy-Ray?’ she said as she approached.

‘Yes it was.’

‘He never stops by any longer.’ She had come to a halt a yard from Howie, staring at him with a look of mild puzzlement on her face. ‘Are you coming to the store, Jo-Beth?’ she said, not looking away from Howie. ‘We’re already late opening.’

‘I’m coming.’

‘Is your friend coming too?’ the woman asked pointedly.

‘Oh yes … I’m sorry … Howie … this is Lois Knapp.’

‘Mrs,’ the woman put in, as though her marital status were a talisman against strange young men.

‘Lois … this is Howie Katz.’

‘Katz?’ Mrs Knapp replied. ‘Katz?’ She removed her gaze from Howie, and studied her watch. ‘Five minutes late,’ she said.

‘It’s no problem,’ Jo-Beth said. ‘We never get anyone in before noon.’

Mrs Knapp looked shocked at this indiscretion.

‘The Lord’s work is not to be taken lightly,’ she remarked. ‘Please be quick.’ Then she stalked off.

‘Fun lady,’ Howie commented.

‘She’s not as bad as she looks.’

‘That’d be difficult.’

‘I’d better go.’

‘Why?’ Howie said. ‘It’s a beautiful day. We could go someplace. Make the most of the weather.’

‘It’ll be a beautiful day tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. This is California, Howie.’

‘Come with me anyway.’

‘Let me try to make my peace with Lois first. I don’t want to be on everyone’s hit list. It’ll upset Momma.’

‘So when?’

‘When what?’

‘When will you be free?’

‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Nope.’

‘I’ll tell Lois I’m going back home to look after Tommy-Ray this afternoon. Tell her he’s sick. It’s only half a lie. Then I’ll come by the motel. How’s that?’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’ She began to move away, then said: ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Don’t want to … kiss … kiss me in public, huh?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘How about private?’

She half-heartedly shushed him as she backed away.

‘Just say yes.’

‘Howie.’

‘Just say yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘See? It’s real easy.’

In the late morning, as she and Lois sat sipping ice water in the otherwise deserted store, the older woman said:

‘Howard Katz.’

‘What about him?’ Jo-Beth said, preparing herself for a lecture on behaviour with the opposite sex.

‘I couldn’t think where I knew the name from.’

‘And now you remember?’

‘A woman who lived in the Grove. ’Way back,’ she said, then turned her attention to wiping a ring of water from the counter with her napkin. Her silence, and the effort she gave to this minor mopping, suggested she was happy to let the subject drop if Jo-Beth chose not to pursue it. Yet she’d felt obliged to raise the issue. Why?

‘Was she a friend of yours?’ Jo-Beth asked.

‘Not of mine.’

‘Of Momma’s?’

‘Yes,’ Lois said, still mopping, though the counter was dry.

‘Yes. She was one of your momma’s friends.’

Suddenly, it came clear.

‘One of the four,’ Jo-Beth said. ‘She was one of the four.’

‘I believe she was.’

‘And she had children?’

‘You know, I don’t remember.’

This was the closest a woman of Lois’s scrupulousness came to lying. Jo-Beth called her on it.

‘You remember,’ she said. ‘Please tell me.’

‘Yes. I guess I do remember. She had a boy.’

‘Howard.’

Lois nodded.

‘You’re sure?’ Jo-Beth said.

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

Now it was Jo-Beth who kept her silence, while in her head she’d tried to re-evaluate the events of recent days in the light of this discovery. What did her dreams, and Howie’s appearance, and Tommy-Ray’s sickness have to do with each other, and with the story she’d heard in ten different versions of the bathing party that had ended in death, insanity and children?

Perhaps Momma knew.

iii

Buddy Vance’s driver Jose Luis waited at their agreed rendezvous for fifty minutes before deciding that his boss must have made his way up the Hill under his own power. He called Coney on the car phone. Ellen was at the house but the boss wasn’t. They debated what was best to do, and agreed he’d wait with the car the full hour then drive back via the route the boss would be likeliest to take.

He was nowhere along that route. Nor had he got home ahead of his ride. Again they debated the options, Jose Luis tactfully avoiding mention of the likeliest: that somewhere along the way he’d encountered female company. After sixteen years in Mr Vance’s employ he knew his boss’s skill with the ladies verged on the supernatural. He would come home when he’d performed his magic.

For Buddy, there was no pain. He was thankful for the fact, but not so self-deceiving as to ignore its significance. His body was surely so messed up his brain had simply overloaded on agony, and pulled the plugs.

The darkness that enclosed him was without qualification; expert only in blinding him. Or perhaps his eyes were out; dashed from his head on the way down. Whatever the reason, detached from sight and feeling, he floated, and while he floated he calculated. First, the time it would take for Jose Luis to realize his boss wasn’t coming home: two hours at the outside. His route through the woods would not be difficult to follow; and once they reached the fissure his peril would be self-evident. They’d be down after him by noon. On the surface and having his bones mended by the middle of the afternoon.

Perhaps it was almost midday already.

The only means he had of calculating time’s passing was his heartbeat, which he could hear in his head. He began to count. If he could get some sense of how long a minute lasted he’d be able to hold on to that span of time, and after sixty, know he’d lived an hour. But no sooner had he started counting than his head started a different calculation altogether.

How long have I lived, he thought. Not breathed, not existed, but actually lived? Fifty-four years since birth: how many weeks was that? How many hours? Better think of it year by year; it was easier. One year was three hundred and sixty days, give or take a few. Say he slept a third of that. One hundred and twenty days in slumber-land. Oh Lord, already the moments dwindled. Half an hour a day on the john, or emptying his bladder. That was another seven and a half days a year, just doing the dirt. And shaving and showering, another ten days; and eating another thirty or forty; and all of this multiplied by fifty-four years …

He began to sob. Get me out of here, he murmured, please God get me out of here, and I’ll live like I never lived, I’ll make every hour, every minute (even sleeping, even shitting) a minute spent trying to understand, so that when the next darkness comes along I won’t be so lost.

At eleven Jose Luis got in the car and drove back down the Hill to see if he could spot the boss somewhere on the street. Drawing a blank there he called in at the Food Stop in the Mall, where they’d named a sandwich in honour of Mr Vance’s patronage (flatteringly, it was mostly meat), then at the record store, where the boss would frequently purchase a thousand dollars’ worth of stock. While quizzing Ryder, who owned the place, a customer came and announced to any who were interested that there was some serious shit going down in the East Grove, and did somebody get shot?

The road down to the woods was closed by the time Jose Luis arrived, a solitary cop directing traffic to turn round.

‘No way through,’ he told Jose Luis. ‘The road’s closed.’

‘What happened? Who got shot?’

‘Nobody got shot. It’s just a crack in the road.’

Jose Luis was out of the car now, staring past the cop to the woods.

‘My boss,’ he said, knowing he needn’t name the owner of the limo, ‘he was running down here this morning.’

‘So?’

‘He hasn’t come back yet.’

‘Oh shit. You’d better follow me.’

They made their way through the trees in a silence broken only by barely coherent messages coming through on the cop’s radio, all of which he ignored, until the thicket opened into a clearing. Several uniformed police were setting up barriers at its fringes to prevent anyone straying where Jose Luis was now led. The ground beneath his feet was cracked, and the cracks widened as the cop led him to where his Chief was standing, staring at the earth. Long before he came near the spot Jose Luis knew what lay ahead. The crack in the street and those he’d stepped over to reach this place were the consequence of a larger disturbance: a crevice fully ten feet across, letting on to a devouring darkness.

‘What’s he want?’ the Chief demanded, jabbing his finger in Jose Luis’s direction. ‘We’re keeping this under wraps.’

‘Buddy Vance,’ the cop said.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s missing,’ Jose Luis said.

‘He went running –’ the cop explained.

‘Let him tell it,’ the Chief said.

‘This is where he goes running every morning. Only today he hasn’t come back.’

‘Buddy Vance?’ the Chief said. ‘The comedian?’

‘Yeah.’

The Chief’s gaze left Jose Luis and returned to the hole.

‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.

‘How deep is it?’ Jose Luis asked.

‘Huh?’

‘The crack.’

‘It’s not a crack. It’s a fucking abyss. I dropped a stone down a minute ago. I’m still waiting for it to hit bottom.’

The realization that he was alone came to Buddy slowly, like a memory stirred up from the silt at the bottom of his brain. Indeed at first he thought it was a memory, of a sand storm he’d been caught in once, on his third honeymoon, in Egypt. But he was lost and guideless in this maelstrom as he’d not been then. And it was not sand that stung his eyes back into sight, nor wind that beat his ears into hearing. It was another power entirely, less natural than a storm, and trapped as no storm had ever been here in a chimney of stone. He saw the hole he’d fallen down for the first time, stretching above him to a sunlit sky so far from him no hint of its reassurance touched him. Whatever ghosts haunted this place, spinning themselves into creation in front of him, they surely came from a time before his species was a gleam in evolution’s eye. Things awesomely simple; powers of fire and ice.

He was not so wrong; and yet completely. The forms emerging from the darkness a short distance from where he lay seemed in one moment to resemble men like himself, and in the next unalloyed energies, wrapped around each other like champions in a war of snakes, sent from their tribes to strangle the life from each other. The vision ignited his nerves as well as his senses. The pain he’d been spared seeped into his consciousness, the trickle becoming first a stream and then a flood. He felt as though he was laid on knives, their points slicing between his vertebrae, puncturing his innards.

Too weak even to moan, all he could be was a mute, suffering witness of the spectacle in front of him, and hope that salvation or death came quickly, to put him out of this agony. Best death, he thought. A godless sonofabitch like him had no hope of redemption, unless the holy books were wrong and fornicators, drunkards and blasphemers were fitted for paradise. Better death, and be done with it. The joke ended here.

I want to die, he thought.

As he formed the intention, one of the entities battling in front of him turned his way. He saw a face in the storm. It was bearded, its flesh so swelled with emotion it seemed to dwarf the body it was set upon, like that of a foetus: skull domed, eyes vast. The terror he felt when it laid its gaze on him was nothing to that which he felt when its arms reached for him. He wanted to crawl away into some niche and escape the touch of the spirit’s fingers, but his body was beyond coaxing or bullying.

‘I am the Jaff,’ he heard the bearded spirit say. ‘Give me your mind, I want terata.’

As the fingertips grazed Buddy’s face he felt a spurt of power, white like lightning, cocaine, or semen, run through his head and down into his anatomy. With it, the recognition that he’d made an error. The split flesh and broken bone was not all he was. Despite his immoralities, there was something in him the Jaff coveted; a corner of his being which this occupying force could profit by. He’d called it terata. Buddy had no idea what that word meant. But he understood all too clearly the terror when the spirit entered him. The touch was lightning, burning a path into his essential self. And a drug too, making images of that invasion cavort in his mind’s eye. And jism? That as well, or else why did a life he’d never had before, a creature born in his pith from the Jaff’s rape, leap out of him now?

He glimpsed it as it went. It was pale and primitive. No face, but legs by the scrabbling dozen. No mind, either, except to do the Jaff’s will. The bearded face laughed to see it. Withdrawing his fingers from Buddy, the spirit let his other arm drop from the neck of his enemy and, riding the terata headed up the rock chimney towards the sun.

The remaining combatant fell back against the cavern wall. From where he lay Buddy caught a glimpse of the man. He looked much less the warrior than his opponent, and consequently more brutalized by their exchange. His body was wasted, his expression one of weary distraction. He stared up the rock chimney.

‘Jaffe!’ he called, his shout shaking dust from the shelves Buddy had struck on his way down. There was no answer from the shaft. The man looked down towards Buddy, narrowing his eyes.

‘I’m Fletcher,’ he said, his voice mellifluous. He moved towards Buddy, trailing a subtle light. ‘Forget your pain.’

Buddy tried his damnedest to say: help me, but he didn’t need to. Fletcher’s very proximity soothed the agonies he felt.

‘Imagine with me,’ Fletcher said. ‘Your fondest wish.’

To die, Buddy thought.

The spirit heard the unspoken reply.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t imagine death. Please don’t imagine death. I can’t arm myself with that.’

Arm yourself? Buddy thought.

‘Against the Jaff.’

Who are you?

‘Men once. Spirits now. Enemies forever. You have to help me. I need the last squeezings of your mind, or I go to war with him naked.’

Sorry, I already gave, Buddy thought. You saw him do the taking. And by the way, what was that thing?

‘The terata? Your primal fears made solid. He’s riding to the world on it.’ Fletcher looked up the chimney again. ‘But he won’t break surface yet. The day’s too bright for him.’

Is it still day?

‘Yes.’

How do you know?

‘The process of the sun still moves me, even here. I wanted to be sky, Vance. Instead, two decades I’ve lived in darkness, with the Jaff at my throat. Now he’s taking the war overground, and I need arms against him, plucked out of your head.’

There’s nothing left, Buddy said. I’m finished.

‘Quiddity must be preserved,’ Fletcher said.

Quiddity?

‘The dream-sea. You might even see its island, as you die. It’s wonderful; I envy you the freedom to leave this world …’

Heaven you mean? Buddy thought. Is it Heaven you mean? If so, I haven’t got a chance.

‘Heaven’s only one of many stories, told on the shores of Ephemeris. There are hundreds, and you’ll know them all. So don’t be afraid. Only give me a little of your mind, so that Quiddity may be preserved.’

Who from?

‘The Jaff, who else?’

Buddy had never been much of a dreamer. His sleep, when it wasn’t drugged or drunk, was that of a man who lived himself to exhaustion daily. After a gig, or a fuck, or both, he would give himself to sleep as to a rehearsal for the final oblivion that called him now. With the fear of nullity a rod to his broken back he scrabbled to make sense of Fletcher’s words. A sea; a shore; a place of stories, in which Heaven was just one of many possibilities? How could he have lived his life and never known this place?

‘You’ve known it,’ Fletcher told him. ‘You’ve swum Quiddity twice in your life. The night you were born, and the night you first slept beside the one you loved most in your life. Who was that, Buddy? There’ve been so many women, right? Which one of them meant most to you? Oh … but of course. In the end, there was only one. Am I right? Your mother.’

How the hell did you know that?

‘Put it down to a lucky guess …’

Liar!

‘OK, so I’m digging around in your thoughts a little. Forgive me the trespass. I need help, Buddy, or the Jaff has me beaten. You don’t want that.’

No, I don’t.

‘Imagine for me. Give me something more than regret to make an ally of. Who are your heroes?’

Heroes?

‘Picture them for me.’

Comedians! All of them.

‘An army of comedians? Why not?’

The thought of it made Buddy smile. Why not indeed? Hadn’t there been a time when he’d thought his art could cleanse the world of malice? Perhaps an army of holy fools could succeed with laughter where bombs had failed. A sweet, ridiculous vision. Comedians on the battlefields, baring their asses to the guns, and beating the generals over the head with rubber chickens; grinning cannon-fodder, confounding the politicians with puns and signing the peace-treaties in polka-dotted ink.

His smile became laughter.

‘Hold that thought,’ Fletcher said, reaching into Buddy’s mind.

The laughter hurt. Even Fletcher’s touch could not mellow the fresh spasms it initiated in Buddy’s system.

‘Don’t die!’ he heard Fletcher say. ‘Not yet! For Quiddity’s sake, not yet!’

But it was no use his hollering. The laughter and the pain had hold of Buddy head to toe. He looked at the hovering spirit with tears pouring down his face.

Sorry, he thought. Can’t seem to hold on. Don’t want to –

Laughter racked him.

– You shouldn’t have asked to remember.

‘A moment!’ said Fletcher. ‘That’s all I need.’

Too late. The life went out of him, leaving Fletcher with vapours in his hands too frail to be set against the Jaff.

‘Damn you!’ Fletcher said, yelling at the corpse as he’d once (so long ago) stood and shouted at Jaffe as he lay on the floor of the Misión de Santa Catrina. This time there was no life to be bullied from the corpse. Buddy was gone. On his face sat an expression both tragic and comical, which was only right. He’d lived his life that way. And in dying he’d assured Palomo Grove of a future burgeoning with such contradictions.

iv

Time in the Grove would play countless tricks in the next few days, but none surely as frustrating to its victim as the stretch between Howie’s parting from Jo-Beth and the time when he would see her again. The minutes lengthened to the scale of hours; the hours seemed long enough to produce a generation. He distracted himself as best he could by going to look for his mother’s house. That had after all been his ambition here: to learn his nature better by grasping his family tree closer to the root. So far, of course, he’d merely succeeded in adding confusion to confusion. He’d not known himself capable of what he’d felt last night – and felt now even more strongly. This soaring, unreasoning belief that all was well with the world, and could never be made unwell again. The fact of time unravelling the way it was could not best his optimism; it was just a game reality was playing with him, to confirm the absolute authority of what he was feeling.

And to that trick was added another, more subtle still. When he came to the house where his mother had lived it was almost supernaturally unchanged, exactly as in the photographs he’d seen of the place. He stood in the middle of the street and stared at it. There was no traffic in either direction; nor any pedestrians. This corner of the Grove floated in mid-morning languor, and he felt almost as though his mother might appear at the window, a child again, and gaze out at him. That notion would not have occurred to him but for the events of the previous night. The miraculous recognition in that locking of eyes – the sense he’d had (still had) that his encounter with Jo-Beth had been a joy in waiting somewhere – led his mind to make patterns it had never dared before, and this possibility (a place from which a deeper self had drawn knowledge of Jo-Beth and known her imminence) would have been beyond him twenty-four hours before. Again, a loop. The mysteries of their meeting had taken him into realms of supposition which led from love to physics to philosophy and back to love again in such a way that art and science could no longer be distinguished.

Nor indeed, could the sense of mystery he felt, standing here in front of his mother’s house, be separated from the mystery of the girl. House, mother, and meeting were one whole extraordinary story. He, the common factor.

He decided against knocking on the door (after all, how much more could he learn from the place?) and was about to retrace his steps when some instinct checked him and instead he continued up the gentle gradient of the street to its summit. There he was startled to find himself presented with a panoramic view of the Grove, looking east over the Mall to where the far fringes of the town gave way to solid foliage. Or nearly solid; here and there the canopy broke, and in one of the gaps quite a crowd appeared to have gathered. Arc-lamps had been erected in a ring, bearing down on some sight too far off for him to see. Were they making a movie down there? He’d spent so much of the morning in a daze he’d noticed almost nothing on his way up here; he could have passed all the stars who’d ever won an Oscar walking these streets and not registered the fact.

While he stood watching, he heard something whisper to him. He looked round. The street behind him was empty. There was no breeze, even here on the brow of his mother’s hill, to carry the sound to him. Yet it came again; a sound so close to his ear it was almost inside his head. The voice was soft. It spoke two syllables only, joined into a necklace of sound.

– ardhowardhowardhow –

It didn’t take a degree in logic to associate this mystery with whatever was going on in the woods below. He couldn’t pretend to understand the processes at work upon and around him. The Grove was clearly a law unto itself, and he’d profited by its enigmas too much to turn his back on future adventures. If pursuit of a steak could bring him the love of his life what might following a whisper bring?

It wasn’t difficult to find his way down to the trees. He had the oddest sense, making the descent, that the whole town led that way; that the hillside was a tipped plate, the contents of which might at any moment slide away into the maw of the earth. That image was reinforced when he finally reached the woods and asked what was going on. Nobody seemed much interested in telling him until a kid piped up:

‘There’s a hole in the ground, an’ it swallowed him whole.’

‘Swallowed who?’ Howie wanted to know. It wasn’t the boy who replied but the woman with him.

‘Buddy Vance,’ she said. Howie was none the wiser, and his ignorance must have registered, because the woman offered supplementary information. ‘He used to be a TV star,’ she said. ‘Funny guy. My husband loves him.’

‘Have they brought him up?’ he asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the boy chipped in. ‘He’s dead anyhow.’

‘Is that right?’ Howie said.

‘Sure,’ came the woman’s reply.

The scene suddenly took on a fresh perspective. This crowd wasn’t here to watch a man being snatched from death’s door. They were here to claim a glimpse of the body as it was put in the back of an ambulance. All they wanted was to say: I was there, when they brought him up. I saw him, under a sheet. Their morbidity, especially on a day so full of possibilities, revolted him. Whoever had called his name was calling it no longer; or if he was the crowd’s louring presence blocked it. There was no purpose in his staying, when he had eyes to gaze into and lips to kiss. Turning his back on the trees, and his summoner, he headed back to the motel to wait for Jo-Beth’s arrival.m

IV

Only Abernethy ever called Grillo by his first name. To Saralyn, from the day they’d met to the night they’d parted, he was always Grillo; to every one of his colleagues and friends, the same. To his enemies (and what journalist, particularly a disgraced one, did not court enemies?) he was sometimes That Fuckhead Grillo, or Grillo the Righteous, but always Grillo.

Only Abernethy ever dared: ‘Nathan?’

‘What do you want?’

Grillo had just stepped out of a shower, but the very sound of Abernethy’s voice and he was ready to scrub himself down again.

‘What are you doing at home?’

‘I’m working,’ Grillo lied. It had been a late night. ‘The pollution piece, remember?’

‘Forget it. Something’s come up and I want you there. Buddy Vance – the comedian? – he went missing.’

‘When?’

‘This morning.’

‘Where?’

‘Palomo Grove. You know it?’

‘It’s a name on a freeway sign.’

‘They’re trying to dig him out. It’s noon now. How long before you can get there?’

‘An hour. Maybe ninety minutes. What’s the big interest?’

‘You’re too young to remember the Buddy Vance Show.’

‘I caught the re-runs.’

‘Let me tell you something, Nathan my boy –’ Of all Abernethy’s modes Grillo hated the avuncular most. ‘– there was a time the Buddy Vance Show emptied the bars. He was a great man and a great American.’

‘So you want a sob piece?’

‘Shit, no. I want the news on his wives, the alcohol, and how come he ended up in Ventura County when he used to swan around Burbank in a limo three fucking blocks long.’

‘The dirt, in other words.’

‘There were drugs involved, Nathan,’ Abernethy said. Grillo could picture the look of mock-sincerity on the man’s face. ‘And our readers need to know.’

‘They want the dirt, and so do you,’ Grillo said.

‘So sue me,’ Abernethy said. ‘Just get your ass out there.’

‘So we don’t even know where he is? Suppose he just took off somewhere?’

‘Oh they know where he is,’ Abernethy said. ‘They’re trying to bring the body up in the next few hours.’

‘Bring it up? You mean he drowned?’

‘I mean he fell down a hole.’

Comedians, Grillo thought. Anything for a laugh.

Except that it wasn’t funny. When he’d first joined Abernethy’s happy band, after the debacle in Boston, it had been a vacation from the heavy-duty investigative journalism in which he’d made his name, and at which, finally, he’d been out-manoeuvred. The notion of working for a small-circulation scandal sheet like the County Reporter had seemed light relief. Abernethy was a hypocritical buffoon, a born-again Christian to whom forgiveness was a four-letter word. The stories he told Grillo to cover were easy in the gathering and easier still in the telling, given that the Reporter’s readers liked their news to perform one function only: the ameliorating of envy. They wanted tales of pain amongst the high rollers; the flipside of fame. Abernethy knew his congregation well. He’d even brought his biography into the act, making much in his editorials of his conversion from alcoholic to Fundamentalist. Dry and High on the Lord, was how he liked to describe himself. This holy sanction allowed him to peddle the muck he edited with a beatific smile, and allowed his readers to wallow in it without guilt. They were reading stories of the wages of sin. What could be more Christian?

For Grillo the joke had long since soured. If he’d thought of telling Abernethy to fuck off once he’d thought of it a hundred times, but where was he going to get a job, hot-shot reporter turned dupe that he was, except with a small operation like the Reporter? He’d contemplated other professions, but he had neither the desire nor aptitude to pursue any other. He had wanted to report the world to itself for as long as he could remember. There was something essential about that function. He could imagine himself performing no other. The world knew itself indifferently well. It needed people to tell it the story of its life, daily, or else how could it learn by its mistakes? He had been making headlines of one such mistake – an act of corruption in the Senate – when he discovered (his gut still turned, recalling that moment) that he had been set up by his target’s opponents, his position as press prosecutor used to besmirch innocent parties. He had apologized, grovelled and resigned. The matter had been forgotten quickly, as a fresh slew of headlines replaced those that he’d created. Politicians, like scorpions and cockroaches, would be there when the warheads had levelled civilization. But journalists were frail. One miscalculation and their credibility was dust. He had fled West until he met the Pacific. He’d considered throwing himself in, but had instead chosen to work for Abernethy. More and more that seemed like an error.

Look on the bright side, he told himself every day, there’s no direction from here but up.

The Grove surprised him. It had all the distinguishing marks of a town created on paper – the central Mall, the cardinal point villages, the sheer order of the streets – but there was a welcome diversity in the styles of the houses, and – perhaps because it was in part built on a hill – a sense that it might have secret reaches.

If the woods had any secrets of their own, they’d been trampled down by the sightseers who’d come to see the exhumation. Grillo flashed his credentials and asked a few questions of one of the cops at the barrier. No, there was no likelihood that the corpse would be raised soon; it had yet to be located. Nor could Grillo speak with any of those in charge of the operation. Come back later, was the suggestion. It looked like good advice. There was very little activity around the fissure. Despite there being tackle of various kinds on the ground nobody seemed to be putting it to use. He decided to risk leaving the scene to make a few calls. He found his way to the Mall and to a public telephone. His first call was to Abernethy, to report that he’d arrived and to enquire whether a photographer had been sent down. Abernethy was away from his desk. Grillo left a message. He had more luck with his second call. The answering machine began playing its familiar message –

‘Hi. This is Tesla and Butch. If you want to speak to the dog, I’m out. If it’s Butch you need –’ only to be interrupted by Tesla.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Grillo.’

‘Grillo? Shut the fuck up, Butch! Sorry, Grillo, he’s trying to –’ the phone was dropped, and there was a good deal of commotion, followed by Tesla’s breathless return to the receiver. ‘That animal. Why did I take him, Grillo?’

‘He was the only male who’d live with you.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Your words.’

‘I said that?’

‘You said that.’

‘Out of my mind! I got good news, Grillo. I got a development deal for one of the screenplays. That castaway picture I wrote last year? They want it rewritten. In space.’

‘You’re going to do it?’

‘Why not? I need something produced. Nobody’s going to do any of the heavy-duty stuff ’til I have a hit. So fuck Art, I’m going to be so crass they’ll be coming in their pants. And before you say it, don’t give me any of that artistic integrity shit. A girl’s got to feed herself.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.