Harry saw no reason to lie. "No, I'm not."
"You cw-ne with him," %he suddenly said. "Oh by the'shu... She flung herself back away from Harry, raising her arms to protect her face.
"It's all right," Harry said. "I wasn't with him. I swear."
He came up the last few steps and started towards her. Too weak to outrun him, the creature sank down against the wall, her broken body wracked with sobs. "Kill me," she said. "I don't care. There's nothing left."
Harry went down on his haunches in front of her. "Listen to me, will you? I didn't come with whoever it was-"
"Kissoon," she said.
"What?" She peered at him through her webbed fingers. "You do know him."
"The Kissoon I know's dead," he said. "Or at least I thought he was."
"He murdered our Blessedm'n and came in to our ceremonies wearing his flesh. And why?"
Harry had an answer to that, at least. "to get into Quiddity."
The creature shook her head. "He didn't leave," she said. "He just sealed the door."
"Are you sure?"
"I saw it with my own eyes. That's how I know it was Kissoon."
:'Explain that."
'When it closed, at the very last moment, there was a light went through everything-the brick, the flow, the dead-and I seemed to see their true nature, just for a little time. And I looked up at him-at the man we'd thought was our Blessedm'n-and I saw another man hidden in his flesh."
"How did you know it was Kissoon?"
"He had tried to join us, once. Said he was an exile, like us, and he wanted to come home with us, back to Quiddity." When she said the word, she shuddered, and more tears came down. "You know what's strange?" she said with a sour little laugh. "I was never there. Most of us were never there. We're the children of exiles, or their children's children. We lived and died for something we only ever knew in stories."
"Do you know where he went9"
"Kissoon?"
Harry nodded.
"Yes, I know. I went after him, to his hiding place."
"You wanted to kill him?"
"Of course. But once I got there I had no strength left. I knew if I faced him like this, he'd finish me. I came back here to prepare myself."
"Tell me where he is. Let me do the job for you."
"You don't know what he can do." "I've heard," Harry replied. "Believe me. I've heard."
"And you think you can kill him?"
"I don't know," Harry said, picturing in his mind's eye the portrait Ted had produced. The heavens livid, the street reeling, and a black snake under his pointed heel. Kissoon was that snake, by another name. "I've beaten some demons in my time."
"He's not a demon," the creature said. "He's a man."
"Is that good news or bad?"
The creature eyed him gravely. "You know the answer to that," she said. Bad, of course, Demons were simple. they believed in prayer and the potency of holy water, Thus they fled from both. But men- what did men believe?
iv The address the creature had given him was up in morningside Heights, around I 10th and Eighth Avenue: an undistinguished house in need of some cosmetic repair. There were no drapes at the lower windows. Harry peered inside. The room was empty: no pictures on the walls, no carpets on the floor, no furniture, nothing. He knew before he'd reached the front door, and found it an inch ajar, and stepped through it into the gray interior, that he'd come too late. The house was empty, or nearly so.
A few signs of Kissoon's occupancy remained. At the top of the stairs, lying in a pool of its own degenerating matter, was a modestly sized Lix. It raised its head at Harry's approach, but with its maker departed, it had lost what tiny wits it had, overreached itself, and slid down the stairs, depositing cobs of sewerage on each step as it descended. Harry followed the fetid trail it had left to the room that Kissoon had lately occupied. It resembled a derelict's hideaway. Newspapers laid in lieu of carpets; a filthy mattress under the grimy window; a heap of discarded cans and plates of rotted food, alongside a second pile, this of liquor bottles. In short, a squalid pit.
There was only one piece of evidence to mark the ambition of the man who had shit and sweated here. On the wall behind the door, a map of the continental United States, upon which Kissoon had inscribed all manner of marks and notations. Harry pulled the map off the wall and took it to the window to study. The man's hand was crabbed, and much of the vocabulary foreign to Harry's eye, like a mismatched marriage of Latin and Russian, but it was plain that over a dozen sites around the country had been of significance to Kissoon. New York City and its environs had attracted the densest concentration of marginalia, with a region in the southwest corner of North Dakota, and another in Arizona, of no little interest to him. Harry folded up the map and pocketed it. Then he made a quick but efficient search of the rest of the room, in the hope of turning up further clues to Kissoon's purpose and methodology. He found nothing of interest, however, excepting a pack of bizarre playing cards, plainly hand-made and much used. He flicked through them. There were perhaps twenty cards, each marked with a simple design: a circle, a fish, a hand, a window, an eye. These he also pocketed, as much for the taking as the wanting, and having done so slipped away past the decayed Lix and out into the warm, pale air.
It was only later, when he spread the cards out on the floor of his office, that he realized what the deck represented. Tesla Bombeck had first described these symbols to him, when speaking of the medallion she'd decoded in the caves beneath Palomo Grove. There had been a human figure at its center, she'd said: a form that Kissoon the card-maker had divided into two sides of a torso, each with an outstretched arm and two legs. The rest of the images were lifted from the medallion design unchanged. Rising above the head of the figure, if Harry remembered Tesla's account aright, had been four symbols apparently representing humanity's ascension to oneness. Below it, another four, representing its return to the simplicity of the single cell. On its left hand, which spurted energy, or blood, symbols that led to a cloud-eclipsed circle: the Cosm. On its right, which spurted like its fellow, symbols leading to an empty circle: the mystery, or perhaps the sacred absence, of the Metacosm.
Harry arranged the signs as Tesla had described, pondering as he did what purpose they'd served Kissoon. was this a game he'd played? Metaphysical solitaire, to keep himself occupied while he planned his plans? Or was it something less frivolous? A way of predicting (or even influencing) the processes the deck described?
He was in the midst of turning these questions over when the telephone rang. It was Nonna.
"Turn on the news," she said. He did so. Images of a fire-gutted building emerged along with a commentary from an on-site reporter. Several corpses had been discovered in the basement of the building, he said. Though the count was as yet unconfirmed, he personally had seen twenty-one victims removed from the building. There was no sign of any survivors, nor much hope now of finding any. "Is that where I think it is?" Norma said.
"That's the place," Harry said. "Have they said anything about the state of the bodies?"
"Just that most of them are burned beyond recognition. they were exiles, I assume." "Yes. "Noticeably so?"
"Vizry",
"That's going to raise a few questions," Norma remarked dryly.
"They'll file it away and pretend it never happened," Harry said. He'd seen the process at work countless times. Rational men dealing with the apparently irrational by turn ing blind eyes.
"Mere was something else, Norma. Or rather somebody."
"Who?"
"Kissoon."
"Impossible."
"I swear."
"You saw him? In the flesh?" "Actually in somebody else's flesh," Harry replied, "but I'm pretty sure it was him."
"He was leading the Order?"
"No. He was the one slaughtering them," Harry said. "they had a door open to Quiddity. A neirica, one of them called it."
"It means passageway," Norma said. "A passageway to sacred wisdom."
"Well, he closed it," Harry replied.
There was a silence while Norma chewed this over. "Let me get this straight," she said. "they opened the neirica; he murdered them and left through it-"
"No.
"I thought you said-"
"I said he closed it. He didn't leave. He's still here in New York."
"You've found him?"
"No. But I will."
THREE
Harry returned to Morningside Heights later that day, and watched the house for seventy-two hours, in the hope of catching Kissoon. He had no particular plan as to how he would deal with him if he did, but took some comfort in the fact that he had the cards and the map. Both, he suspected, were of some value to Kissoon. Enough to have him stay his hand if killing Harry meant he'd never be able to find out where they were hidden. At least, that was the calculation.
As it turned out, both wait and calculation were wasted. After three days of almost constant surveillance, without so much as a glimpse of Kissoon, Harry went back into the house. The Lix at the bottom of the stairs was little more than a crusty stain on the boards. As for Kissoon's bedroom, it had been ransacked, presumably by its sometime occupant searching for the cards. He would not come back, Harry Ilues,,,ed. He'd done his work here. He was off on the road somewhere.
The next day Harry left for North Dakota, and the pursuit that would occupy the next seven weeks of his life began. The only person he informed was Norma and, despite her questions, he refused to furnish her with details for fear Kissoon had an agent among the dead listening in. The only other person he was tempted to tell was Grillo, but he decided against it. He'd never been certain of Grillo's agenda, or in truth of his allegiances. If Harry shared any part of what he knew in the hope of tracking Kissoon through the Reef, he risked the information finding its way back through the system to the enemy. Better to disappear silently, presumed incapacitated or dead.
Harry spent eleven days in North Dakota, first in Jamestown, then in Napoleon and Wishek, where by chance he picked up a trail that led him west, into the Badlands. There, during a spell of brutally hot weather at the end of July, he came within a day, perhaps two, of Kissoon, who had moved on, leaving another massacre behind. This time, there was no fire to conceal the bizarre nature of the corpses, and after a short time all reports of the incident were suppressed. But Harry had garnered enough information to be certain Kissoon had done here what he'd done in New York: located and destroyed a group of exiles from Quiddity '
Whether they too had been in the process of opening a door back into the Metacosm he could not discover, but he assumed so. Why else would Kissoon go to the trouble of slaughtering them?
The assumption begged a question that had been itching at the base of his skull since he'd left New York. Why, after being exiled in the Cosm for so many years, were these people now gaining access to Quiddity? Had they discovered some conjuration previously unknown to them, which opened doors where there had only been solid walls? Or were those walls becoming thinner for some reason, the divide between this world and the Metacosm growing frail'?
The heat did nothing for his equilibrium. Lingering in Wishek, hoping to discover where Kissoon had headed next, his fears grew gross in the swelter, and bred hallucinations. Twice in two days he thought he saw Kissoon out walking, and pursued him around corners only to find the streets empty. And at dusk, watching the solid world succumb to doubt, he seemed to see the shadows shift, as though darkness was the weakest place in the Cosm's wall, and there the cracks were beginning to show.
He looked for some comfort in the people around him, the tough, uncomplicated men and women who had chosen this joyless corner of the planet to call home. Surely there was some reserve of hard-won truth in them that would help him keep the delirium at arm's distance. He couldn't ask for evidence of it outright, of course (they already viewed his presence with suspicion enough), but he made a point of listening to their exchanges, hoping to find some plain wisdom there that could be used against the insanities he felt creeping upon him. But there was no solace in his study. they were as sad and cruel and lost as any people he'd encountered. By day they made their dull rounds with sullen faces, their feelings locked out of sight. By night, the men got drunk (and sometimes violent) while the women stayed home, watching the same chat shows and cop shows that softened wits from coast to coast.
He was glad to go, finally, into Minnesota, where he'd read of an incident of cult murder outside Duluth, and hoped to discover Kissoon's hand at work. He was disappointed. The day after his arrival, the cultists-two brothers and their shared mistress, all three in severely psychotic states-were arrested and admitted to the slaughter.
With the trail growing colder by the hour, he contemplated traveling down into Nebraska and hooking up with Grillo in Omaha. It was not his preference-the man's contempt still rankled-but he increasingly suspected he had no choice. He put off calling Grillo for a day. Then, finally, dulling his irritation with half a bottle of scotch, he made the call, only to discover that Grillo wasn't home. He declined to leave a message, fearful as ever that the wrong ears would be attending to it. Instead, he finished off the other half bottle, ;ttid went to bed drunker than he'd been in many a year.
And he dreamed; dreamed he was back in Wyckoff Street, up in that foul room with the demon that had slaughtered Father Hess, its flesh like embers in a gusty wind, dimiiiing and brightening in the murky air.
It had called itself by many names during the long hours of their confrontation: the Hammennite, Peter the Nomad, Lazy Susan. But towards the end, either out of fatigue or boredom, it gave up all its personas but one.
"I am DAmour," it had said, over and over. "I am you and you are love and that's what makes the world go round.