"I thought I"d never see you again," she said, her hands over her face.
"I wouldn"t have left you."
"At least we can die together now."
"Where"s Tommy-Ray?"
"He"s gone," she said.
"We"ve got to do the same," Howie said. "Get off the island as quickly as possible. Something terrible"s coming."
She dared to look up at him, her eyes as clear and blue as they"d ever been, staring out at him like the gleam of treasure in muck. The sight made him hold her tighter, as if to prove to her (and to himself) that he"d mastered the horror. He hadn"t. It was her beauty that had first taken his breath away. Now that was gone. He had to look beyond its absence to the Jo-Beth he"d later come to love. That was going to be hard.
He looked away from her, towards the sea. The waves were thunderous.
"We have to go back into Quiddity," he said.
"We can"t!" she said. "I can"t!"
"We"ve got no choice. It"s the only way back."
"It did this to me," she said. "It changed me!"
"If we don"t go now," Howie said, "we never go. It"s as simple as that. We stay here and we die here."
"Maybe that"s for the best," she said.
"How can that be?" Howie said. "How"s dying for the best?"
"The sea"ll kill us anyway. It"ll twist us up."
"Not if we trust it. Give ourselves over to it."
He remembered, briefly, his journey here, floating on his back, watching the lights. If he thought the return trip would be so mellow he was kidding himself. Quiddity was no longer a tranquil sea of souls. But what other choice did they have?
"We can stay," Jo-Beth said again. "We can die here, together. Even if we got back-" she started to sob again, "-even if we got back I couldn"t live like this."
"Stop crying," he told her. "And stop talking about dying. We"re going to get back to the Grove. Both of us. If not for our sakes, then to warn people."
"About what?"
"There"s something coming across Quiddity. An invasion. Heading home. That"s why the sea"s going wild."
The commotion in the sky above them was every bit as violent. There was no sign, either in sea or sky, of the spirit-lights. However precious these moments on the Ephemeris were, every last dreamer had forsaken the journey, and woken. He envied them the ease of that pa.s.sage. Just to be able to snap out of this honor and find yourself back in your own bed. Sweaty, maybe; scared, certainly. But home. Sweet and easy. Not so for the trespa.s.sers like themselves, flesh and blood in a place of spirit. Nor, now he thought of it, for the others here. He owed them a warning, though he suspected his words would be ignored.
"Come with me," he said.
He took hold of Jo-Beth"s hand and they headed back along the beach to where the rest of the survivors were gathered. Very little had changed, though the man who"d been lying in the waves had now gone, dragged away, Howie presumed, by the violence of the sea. Apparently n.o.body had gone to his aid. They were standing or sitting as before, their lazy gazes still on Quiddity. Howie went to the nearest of them, a man not much older than himself, with a face born for its present vacuity.
"You have to get out of here," he said. "We all have to."
The urgency in his voice did something to rouse the man from his torpor, but not much. He managed a wary "Yeah?" but did nothing.
"You"ll die if you stay," Howie told him, then raised his voice above the waves to address them all. "You"ll die!" he said. "You have to go into Quiddity, and let it take you back."
"Where?" said the young man.
"What do you mean, where?"
"Back where?"
"To the Grove. The place you came from. Don"t you remember?"
There was no answer forthcoming from any of them. Maybe the only way to get an exodus going was to start it, Howie reasoned.
"It"s now or never," he said to Jo-Beth.
There was still resistance, both in her expression and in her body. He had to take firm hold of her hand and lead her down towards the waves.
"Trust me," he said.
She didn"t answer him, but nor did she fight to stay on the beach. A distressing docility had come over her, its only virtue, he thought, that maybe Quiddity would leave her alone this time. He was not so sure it would treat him with such indifference. He was by no means as detached from high emotion as he"d been on the outward journey. There were all kinds of feelings running rife in him, any or all of which Quiddity might want to make play with. Fear for their lives ranked highest, of course. Close after, the confusion of repugnance at Jo-Beth"s condition and his guilt at that repugnance. But the message in the air was urgent enough to keep him moving down the beach in spite of such anxieties. It was almost a physical sensation now, which reminded him of some other time in his life, and of course of some other place; a memory he couldn"t quite grasp. It didn"t matter. The message was unambiguous. Whatever the Iad were, they brought pain: relentless, unendurable. A holocaust in which every property of death would be explored and celebrated but the virtue of cessation, which would be postponed until the Cosm was a single human sob for release. Somewhere he"d known a hint of this before, in a little corner of Chicago. Perhaps his mind was doing him service, refusing to remember where.
The waves were a yard ahead, rising in slow arcs and booming as they broke.
"This is it," he said to Jo-Beth.
Her only response-one he was mightily grateful for- was to tighten her hold on his hand, and together they stepped back into the transforming sea.
IV.
The door of the Nguyen house was answered to Grillo, not by Ellen, but by her son. "Is your mom in?" he asked.
The boy still looked far from well, though he was no longer dressed for bed, but in grubby jeans and a grubbier T-shirt.
"I thought you"d gone away," he said to Grillo.
"Why?"
"Everybody else has."
"That"s right."
"You want to come in?"
"I"d like to see your mom."
"She"s busy," Philip said, but opened the door anyway. The house was even more of a shambles than it had been before, the remains of several ad hoc meals spread around. The creations of a child gourmet, Grillo guessed: hot dogs and ice cream.
"Where is your mom?" Grillo asked Philip.
He pointed in the direction of the bedroom, picked up - plate of half-devoured food, and wandered away.
"Wait," Grillo said. "Is she ill?"
"Nope," said the boy. He looked as though he hadn"t slept a full eight hours in weeks, Grillo thought. "She doesn"t come out any more," he went on. "Except at night."
He waited for Grillo to answer with a nod, then headed to his room, having supplied all the information he felt obliged to offer. Grillo heard the boy"s door close, leaving him to ponder the problem alone. Recent events hadn"t given him much time for erotic daydreams, but the hours he"d spent here, in the very room where Ellen had holed herself up, exercised a strong hold on his mind and groin. Despite the hour of the morning, his general fatigue, and the desperation of circ.u.mstances in the Grove, a part of him wanted to conclude the business left unfinished last time: to make proper love to Ellen just once before he took the trip underground.
He crossed to Ellen"s door, and knocked on it. The only sound from inside was a moan.
"It"s me," he said. "Grillo. Can I come in?"
Without waiting for a reply he turned the handle. The door was not locked-it opened half an inch-but something prevented it from opening further. He pushed a little harder, and harder still. A chair, wedged under the handle on the far side, slid noisily to the floor. Grillo opened the door.
At first he thought she was alone in the room. Sick, and alone. She lay on an unmade bed in her dressing gown, which was untied, and spread open. Beneath, she was naked. Only very slowly did she turn her face in his direction, and when she did-her eyes gleaming in the stale murk-it took her several seconds to rouse any reply to his appearance.
"Is it really you?" she said.
"Of course. Yes. Who else-?"
She sat up a little way on the bed, and pulled the bottom of the gown across her body. She hadn"t shaved since he"d been here, he saw. Indeed he doubted she had been out of the room very much. It smelled of prolonged occupation.
"You shouldn"t...see, " she said.
"I"ve seen you naked before," he murmured. "I wanted to see again."
"I don"t mean me," she replied.
He didn"t understand her remark until her eyes fell away from him and went to the furthest corner of the room. His gaze went with hers. At their destination, deep in the shadows, was a chair. In the chair was what he"d taken, on entering the room, to be a heap of clothes. It was not. The paleness wasn"t linen but bare skin, the folds those of a man sitting naked in the chair, his body bent almost double, so that his forehead rested on his clasped hands. They were tied together at the wrists. The cord that bound them went on down to his ankles, which it also bound together.
"This," Ellen said softly, "is Buddy."
At the sound of his name the man raised his head. Grillo hadn"t seen more than the last remnants of Fletcher"s army, but it had been enough to recognize the look they"d had when their half-life began to run out. He saw that look now. This was not the real Buddy Vance, but a figment of Ellen"s imagination, something her desires had summoned and shaped. The face was still very much intact: perhaps she"d imagined that with more precision than the rest of his anatomy. It was deeply lined-almost plowed-but undeniably charismatic. When he sat completely upright the second most detailed part of him came into view. Tesla"s gossip had, as ever, been reliable. The hallucigenia was hung like a donkey. Grillo stared, only to be shaken from his envy when the man spoke.
"Who are you to come in here?" he said.
The fact that this artifact had sufficient self-will to speak shocked him.
"Hush," Ellen told him.
The man looked across at her, struggling against his bonds.
"He wanted to leave last night," she told Grillo. "I don"t know why."
Grillo did, but said nothing.
"I wouldn"t let him, of course. He likes to be kept this way. We used to play this game a lot."
"Who is this?" Vance said.
"Grillo," Ellen replied. "I told you about Grillo." She pulled herself up on the bed, until her back was against the wall, her arms resting on her raised knees. She was presenting her c.u.n.t to Vance"s gaze. He ogled it, gratefully, while she continued to speak. "I told you about Grillo," she said. "We made love, didn"t we, Grillo?"
"Why?" Vance said. "Why are you punishing me?"
"Tell him, Grillo," Ellen said. "He wants to know."
"Yes," Vance said, his tone suddenly tentative. "Tell me. Please tell me."
Grillo didn"t know whether to throw up or laugh. He thought the last scene he"d played out in this room had been perverse enough, but this was something else again. A dream of a dead man in bondage, begging to be castigated with a report of s.e.x with his mistress.
"Tell him," Ellen said again.
The strange undertow in her demand gave Grillo voice.
"This isn"t the real Vance," he said, taking pleasure in the idea of stripping her of this dream. But she was there ahead of him.
"I know that," she said, letting her head loll as she regarded her prisoner. "He"s out of my mind." She kept staring at him. "And so am I."
"No," Grillo said.
"He"s dead," she replied softly. "He"s dead but he"s still here. I know he isn"t real but he"s here. So I must be mad."
"No, Ellen...this is just because of what happened at the Mall. You remember? The burning man? You"re not the only one."
She nodded, her eyes half closing.
"Philip..."she said.
"What about him?"
"He had dreams too."
Grillo thought of the boy"s face again. The pinched look; the loss in his eyes.
"So if you know this...man isn"t real, why the games?" he said.
She let her eyes close completely.
"I don"t know..." she began, "...what"s real or not any more." There was a sentiment that struck a chord, Grillo thought. "When he appeared I knew he wasn"t here the way he used to be here. But maybe that doesn"t matter."
Grillo listened, not wanting to break Ellen"s train of thought. He"d seen so much that confounded him of late- miracles and mysteries-and in his ambition to be a witness to these sights he"d held himself at a distance. Paradoxically, that made the telling of the story a problem. And it was his problem too. He was eternally the observer, keeping feelings at bay for fear they touched him too deeply and so drowned out his hard-earned disinterestedness. Was that why what had happened on this bed held such sway over his imagination? To be disconnected from the essential act; become a function of somebody else"s desire, somebody else"s heat and intention? Did he envy that more than Buddy Vance"s twelve inches?
"He was a great lover, Grillo," Ellen was saying. "Especially when he"s burning up, because somebody else is where he wants to be. Roch.e.l.le didn"t like to play that game."