"That doesn't tell me anything," Tesia replied. "I want to know what the fuck you are."
"Too long a story to tell you now," Rare Utu replied.
"Then I'm never going to hear it," Tesia said.
"Perhaps it's better that way," Yie replied. "Better you go on your way."
"Yes, go on," the third of the trio said. "We want to know what happens next-2' "Haven't you seen enough?" Tesla said.
"Never," said Rare Utu, almost sorrowfully. "Buddenbaum showed us so much. So much."
"But never enough," Yie said. "Maybe you should try getting involved," Tesla said.
Rare Utu actually shuddered. "We could never do that," she said.
"Never."
"Then you'll never be satisfied," Tesla said, and turning from them, she started back towards her bike, casting glances at Tommy-Ray now and again. She needn't have worried. He was still smothered in the mists of his legion.
She broke a couple of bungee cords out of the tool box and carefully secured the baby to the back seat. Then she started the engine, half expecting the sound to bring the legion scurrying to find her. But no. When she rounded the corner the Death-Boy and his ghosts had not moved. She drove on past them, glancing back once to see if the Jai-Wai had gone from the slope. they had. They'd had the pleasure of the triple tragedy here, damn them, and moved on to find some other entertainment.
She felt nothing but contempt for them. Plainly they were of some higher order of being, but their vicarious interest in the spectacle of human suffering sickened her. Tommy-Ray couldn't help himself. they could.
And yet, for all her rage towards them, the phrase they had repeated over and over kept returning, and would, she supposed, until death deafened her.
What next? That was the eternal inquiry. What next? What next? What next?
EIGHT
"Are they planning to crucify you, D'Amour?"
Harry turned from the crosses in front of which he stood, and looked at the monkish fellow who was emerging from the mist. He was a study in simplicity, his dark clothes without a single concession to vanity, his hair cropped until it barely shadowed his scalp, his wide, plain face almost colorless. And yet, there was something here Harry knew, something in the eyes.
"Kissoon?" The man's blank expression soured. "It is, isn't it?"
"How did you know?"
"Untether me and I'll tell you," Harry said. He'd been tied to a stake driven into the ground.
"I'm not that interested," Kissoon replied. "Did I ever tell you how much I like your name? Not Harold; Harold's ridiculous. But D'Amour. I may take it, when you're up there." He nodded towards the middle cross. Gamaliel and Bartho were in the midst of taking down the woman's body.
"Maybe I'll have a hundred names," Kissoon went on. Then, dropping his voice to a whisper: "And maybe none at all." This seemed to please him.
"Yes, that's for the best. to be nameless." His hands went up to his cheek. "Maybe faceless too.You think the lad's going to make you King of the World'?" Harry said.
"You've been talking to Tesla."
"It's not oing to happen, Kissoon."
"Are you familiar with the works of Filip the Chantiac? No? He was a hermit. Lived on an island, a tiny island, close to the coast of Almoth's Saw. Very few people dared go there- they feared the currents carrying them past the Chantiac's island and washing them up on the lad's shore-but those who did came back with fragments of his wisdom-"
"Which were?"
"I'll get to that. The thing is, Filip the Chantiac had been the ruler of the city of b'Kether Sabbat in his time, and he'd been all the things we pray for our leaders to be. But even so there was dissension and violence and hatred in his city. So one day he said, 'I can't deal with the taint of Sapas Humana any longer,' and took himself off to his island. And at the end of his life, when somebody asked him what he wished for the world, he said, 'I dream only of an end to courage and compassion and devotion. An end to human strength, and to human endurance. An end to brotherhood. An end to sisterhood. An end to defiance in grief, and consolation in laughter. An end to hope. Then we may all return to fishes, and be content."'
"And that's what you want?" Harry said.
"Oh yes. I want an end-"
"to what?" "to that damn city for one," Kissoon replied, nodding down the mountain in the direction of Everville. He came a little closer. Harry scrutinized his face, looking for some crack in the mask, but he could see none. "I spent a lot of time sealing up neirica across the continent," he said. "Making sure that when the lad finally came through it would be over thiv threshold they came."
"You don't even know what they are-"
"It doesn't really matter. They're bringing the end of things. That's what's important."
"And what'll happen to you?"
"I'll have this hill," Kissoon said, "and I'll look down from it on a world of fishes."
"Suppose you're wrong?" "About what?"
"About the lad. Suppose they're pussycats?"
"They're everything that's rotted in us, D'Amour. They're every fetid, fucked-up thing that feeds on our sbit, and waits to be loosed when nobody's looking." He came closer still, until he was just out of Harry's range. His hand had gone to his chest. "Have you looked into the human heart recently?" he said.
"Not in the last couple of days, no."
"Unspeakable, the things in there-"
"In you, maybe."
"Everyone, D'Amour, everyone! Rage and hatred an' d appetite!" He pointed back towards the door. "That's what coming, D'Amour. It won't have a human face, but it')] have a human heart. I guarantee it."
Behind Harry, the body of Kate O'Farrell was dropped to the ground. He glanced back at her, the agony of her last moments fixed upon her face.
"A terrible thing, the human heart," Kissoon was saying. "A very terrible thing."
It took Harry a moment to persuade his eyes from the dead woman's face, as though some idiot part of him thought he might learn some way to avoid her suffering by studying it. When he looked back at Kissoon, the man had turned away, and was heading up the slope again. "Enjoy the view, D'Amour," he said, then was gone.
As Joe left the city streets to follow the lad along the shoreto witness, if nothing more, to witness-the ground began to shudder. to his left, the dream-sea threw itself into a greater frenzy than ever. to his right, the highway that ran along the edge of the beach cracked and buckled, falling away in places. The mass of lad, which was now within two hundred yards of' the door, was apparently indifferent to the tremors. It had resembled many things to Joe in his brief time knowing it. A wall, a cloud, a diseased body. Now it looked to him like a swarm of minute insects so dense it kept every speck of light and comprehension out as it seethed towards its destination, The door had grown considerably in the hours since 'd first stepped through it. Though its lower regions were till wreathed in mist, its highest point was now several hundred yards above the beach, and rising even as he watched, cracking the heavens. If there were angels on the other side, he thought, this would be the time for them to show their faces; to swoop and drive the lad back with their glory. But the crack went on growing, and the lad advancing, and the only response was not from heaven, but from the earth on which his spirit stood The rock's convulsions did not go unfelt on Harmon's Heights. The tremors ran through ground and mist alike, causing some measure of alarm amongst Zury's faction. Harry couldn't see them, but he could hear them well enough, their songs of welcome-which they had only recently begun@ecaying into sobs of fearful expectation as the violence in the rock escalated.
"Something's happening on the shore," Coker said to Erwin. "We should stay away," the lawyer counseled, casting i fearful look up at the crosses. "This is worse than I thought."
"Yes it is,,' Coker said. "But that doesn't mean wt, should be cowards!"
He hurried on, past the crosses and the tethered D'Amour, up the slope, which was rolling in mounting waves. Reluctantly, Erwin followed, more out of a fear that he would lose his one companion in this insanity than from any genuine urge to know what lay ahead. He wished-ah, how he wished-for the life he'd led before he'd found McPherson's confession. For pettiness, for triviality; for all the little things that had vexed him. Digging through hi,; fridge for something that smelled bad; finding a stain on hi,, favorite tie; standing in front of the mirror wishing he hat] more hair and less belly. Perhaps it had been a bland life. puttering on without purpose or direction, but he'd liked its banality, now that he was denied it. Better that than the crosses, and the door, and the whatever was coming through it.
"Do you see?" said Coker, once Erwin had caught up with him.
He saw. How could he not? The door, stretching up through the mist as if eager to pierce the stars. The shore on the far side of it, every rock and pebble upon it rising in a solid wave. And worst of all, the swarming wall of energies approaching across that shore "Is that it?" he said to Coker. He'd expected a more pal-, pable manifestation of the hann it brought. A devourer's tools, a torturer's smm, a lunatic's frenzy: something to advertise its evil. But instead, here was a thing he could have discovered by closing his eyes. The busy darkness behind his lids.
Coker yelled something over his shoulder by way of reply, but it was lost in the tumult. The shore beyond the threshold was convulsing, as though it were a body in the throes of a grand mal, each spasm throwing boulders the size of houses up into the air; and up, and up again, the scale of the seizure increasing exponentially as Erwin watched. Coker, meanwhile, strode on, the ground around him growing increasingly insolid, stones, dirt and plant life melted into filthy stew. It had mounted up to his waist now, and it seemed even his phantom body was subject to its currents, because he was twice thrown off his feet and washed back in Erwin's direction.
He wasn't daring the tide simply to get a better view of the quaking shore. There were two other figures in the grip of this liquid earth-an old woman hanging on to the back of a man who looked to be in the last moments of life-and Coker was struggling to reach them. Blood ran from a grievous wound on the side of the man's head, where something-perhaps a rock-had sheared off his car and opened his scalp to his skull. Why Coker was so interested to study these unfortunates was beyond Erwin, but he strode into the melted dirt himself to find out.
This time he heard what Coker was hollering.
"Oh Mary, mother of God, look at her. Look!"
"What is it?" Erwin yelled back.
"That's Maeve, Toothaker! That's my wife!"
The escalating turmoil had not dissuaded Bartho from his task. The more the ground swayed and shook the more attentive to his duties he became, as though his redemption lay in finishing the business of crucifying D'Amour.
He was bending to the task of untethering Harry to bring him to the cross when one of Blessedm'n Zury's acolytes-a creature with a round, piebald face, and the bow-legged gait of a midget-rolled into view and picked up Bartho's hammer. The crucifer instructed him to put it down, but instead the acolyte rushed at him and struck him in the face, the blow so fast and fierce the bigger man was felled. Before he could get up again the acolyte struck him a second and third time. Pale fluid sprayed from Bartho's cracked skull, and he let out a rhythmical whoop.
If it was a call for help, it went unanswered, or perhaps unheard, given the din that was shaking earth and air. With his whoop failing him Bartho started to rise, but the hammer was there to meet him, and this time cracked his face from chin to brow. He sank down, the blood gushing from him, and lay twitching under the empty cross.
Harry had meanwhile been working at his knotted wrists with his teeth, but before he could free himself the acolyte tossed the bloodied hammer away, pulled a knife from Bartho's belt and waddled over to free the prisoner.
"Doesn't take much, does it?" the man said to Harry, his voice a nasal whine. "One rope and you're reduced to an animal." He worked at the knot with the blade, his back to the crack. "What's going on over there?" he wanted to know.
"I can't make out." The rope was cut, and fell away. "Thank you," D'Amour said. "I don't know why-"
"It's me, Harry. It's Raul." "Raul?"
The round face beamed. "I finally got a body of my own," he said.
"Well, not quite. There's something else in here with me, but it's virtually cretinous."
"What happened to Tesla?"
"I was separated from her, at the threshold. The power there, it's overwhelming. It pulled me out of her head."
"And where is she now?"
"She went to look for Grillo, I think," Raul said. "I'm going to go look for her, before it's all over. I want to make my farewells. What about you?"
Harry's gaze went back to the maelstrom around the door. "When the lad comes-" Raul said.
"I know. It'll take hold of my head and fill it with shit." There were already signs of the lad's proximity in the air. Harry's eyes were stinging, his head whining, his teeth aching. "Is it the Devil, Raul?"
"If you want it to be," Raul replied.
Harry nodded. It was as good an answer as any.
"You're not coming then?" Raul said.
"No," Harry replied. "I came up here to see what the Enemy looks like and that's what I'm going to do."
"Men I'll wish you lucV,,, Raul said, as another wave of shudders Passed through the ground. "I'm out of here, D'Amour!" With that, he turned and stumbled away between the crosses, leaving Harry to continue his interrupted ascent. There were fissures gaping in the ground around him, the widest of them a yard across, and growing. A viscous mess of liquefied earth was rolling down from the area around the crevices, and running off into them.
And beyond it, the neirica itself, which was now fully thirty yards wide, offering Harry a substantial view of the shore. It was no longer the seductive place he'd glimpsed from the chambers of the Zyem Carasophia. The lad's titanic form blocked out the dream-sea, and the shore itself was a rising hail of rock and dirt. It didn't block the lad's influence upon his mind, however. He felt a wave of intense selfrevulsion taint his thoughts. It was a sickness in him, the taint told him, wanting to see this abomination face to face: a disease from which he would deservedly die, He tried to shake the poison from his head, but it wouldn't go. He stumbled on with images of death filling his mind's eye: Ted Dusseldorf's body on a gurney, covered by a sheet; the mangled flesh of the Zyem Carasophia, sprawled around their chamber; Maria Nazareno's corpse, slumped in front of a candle flame. He heard them sobbing all around him, the dead, demanding explanation.