And now two of the weed-cleaners left off their labors and were diving down through the tangle of weeds. She didn’t doubt their purpose. They were coming to rescue Joe.
He hadn’t seen them. He was too intent on fucking, pressing into her over and over, despite the pain on his face.
“Joe . . . ” she murmured.
“It’s okay,” he thought to her. “It’s kinda raw but—”
“Open your eyes, Joe.” He opened them. “They’re coming for you.” He looked up now, and tried to wave his rescuers away, but either they thought the gestures were pleas, or else they didn’t care.
The latter, Phoebe guessed, glimpsing their features. They had a distinctly alien cast to them, but it wasn’t their strangeness that chilled her, it was their total absence of expression. She didn’t want Joe taken from her by these blank-faced creatures. She took tighter hold of him.
“Don’t go,” she said.
“No way,” he murmured, “I’m here, baby, I’m here.”
“They’re going to take you.”
“No they’re not. I won’t let them.” He pulled out of her, almost all the way, then slid back up into her, slowly, slowly, as though they had all the time in the world. “We’re staying together till we’re done,” he said.
He’d no sooner spoken than his rescuers laid their hands on him. Was she perhaps invisible to all but the man who had brought her here? It seemed so, for they made no attempt to detach her arms from around his body. They simply tugged on him; as though it was the weeds he’d fallen prey to.
Joe had no choice but to unhand Phoebe in order to beat them off. But the moment he did so, they claimed him. He was hauled up through her arms, a shocking burst of blood coming from his groin as he was detached from her. For a moment she lost sight of him in the stained water. All she could do was cry out to him, mind to mind.
“Joe! Joe!”
He answered her, but all the strength had gone from his voice.
“No . . . ” he moaned, “I don’t want . . . don’t want to . . . ”
She started to flail blindly, hoping to catch hold of his leg or ankle, and keep him from being taken, but the weeds resisted her motion, and by the time the water cleared enough for her to see his body, it was beyond her grasp.
“Can you hear me, Joe?” she sobbed.
The sound she heard in her head was not words, not even moans, but a hiss, like gas escaping a slit pipe.
“Oh God, Joe,” she said, and began to struggle against the weeds afresh, desperate to rise and be with him. But their desire for her, which had been so arousing a couple of minutes before, had become nightmarish. They pressed at her orifices with the same insistence as ever, the pods swaying in her mouth and depositing a bitter fluid down her throat.
She started to shudder from head to foot, her whole body spasming. There were other sounds coming from somewhere: distant voices, children’s laughter. Was it from the ship?
No. Not the ship. The world. It was coming from the world. It was morning, Festival morning, and folks were already up to meet the day.
“Don’t panic,” she told herself, and gave up thrashing in the weeds for a few moments, to regain control of her body. The spasms lessened. The sounds withdrew a little way. Very slowly, she looked for Joe. He and his rescuers had broken surface, she saw. Others were leaning over the side of the vessel to haul him out of the water. It didn’t take her long to realize why he hadn’t replied to her. He was a dead-weight, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.
A shudder of horror shook her.
“Not dead,” she murmured. “Oh God, please; please, not dead.”
Blood was running from between his legs, a spreading pool staining the surface.
“Joe,” she said. “I don’t know if you can hear me . . . ” She listened, hoping for a reply, but none came. “I want you to know I’m going to come and find you. I know you told me not to, but I am. I’m going to find you and we’re going to—”
She stopped, puzzled to see one of the creatures leaning over the side of the vessel, gesturing to Joe’s rescuers. The mystery was solved a moment later. Without ceremony, they released the body, returning it to the elements they’d claimed it from.
“No!” she yelled, seeing her worst fears confirmed. “No, please, no—”
There was no controlling the spasms this time. They convulsed her body from scalp to sole. And as they came, so did the day she had shunned, laughter, light, and all. She felt the lumpy mattress beneath her back; smelled the staleness of the room.
Even now, she fought to keep wakefulness at bay. If she could only catch hold of Joe’s body—stop him from tumbling away down into the darkness—perhaps she could work some miracle upon him. Put her last dreaming breath into him, and keep him from oblivion.
She started to reach up towards his sinking form—the day was upon her; she had seconds at best—and her fingers caught hold of his trouser leg. She pulled him closer. His mouth was open and his eyes closed. He looked deader than Morton had looked. “Don’t, love,” she said to him, meaning don’t give up, don’t die, don’t leave me.
She let go of his trousers and took hold of his face, cupping it in her hands and drawing his mouth to hers. He came with horrible ease, but she refused to be discouraged. She laid her lips on his, and said his name, like a summons.
“Joe.”
There was light in her eyes. She could not resist it any longer.
“Joe.”
Her eyes opened. And as they did so, in the last moment before the sea and the weeds and her lover disappeared, she saw, or imagined she saw, his lids flicker, as though her summons had stirred some sliver of life in him.
Then she was awake, and there was no way of knowing.
She squinted up at the beam of sunlight slipping between the crack in the drapes. The sheets were as tangled around her as the weeds where she’d almost let her body go to joy; the pillow was damp with her sweat. She had dreamed all that she’d just experienced, but she knew without question this was no ordinary dream. While her body had tussled and sweated here, her spirit had been in another place, a place as real as the bed on which she lay.
It was probably wonderful that such a place existed. It would probably change the world, if the world were ever to find out. But she didn’t care. All that concerned her right now was Joe. Without him, the world wasn’t worth a damn.
She got up and pulled back the drapes. It was Festival Saturday, and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. An escaped helium balloon, shining silver, floated into view. She watched it as the breeze carried it up over the pinetops towards the Heights. She would be following soon, she thought. No matter that this was Everville’s day of days. No matter that the valley would be ringing from end to end with the din of people making music and money and love. Somewhere on the mountain a door stood open, and she would be through it before noon, or be dead in the attempt.
PART FOUR
THE DEVIL AND D’AMOUR
ONE
I
That,” said the man with the salmon-pink tie, gesturing towards the canvas on the gallery wall, “is an abomination. What the hell’s it called?” He peered at his price sheet.
“Bronx Apocalypse,” the man at his side said.
“Bronx Apocalypse,” the critic snorted. “Jesus!”
He eyed the man who’d supplied the title. “You’re not him, are you?” he said. “You’re not this fellow Dusseldorf?”
The other man—a well-made fellow in his late thirties, with three days’ growth of beard and the eyes of an insomniac—shook his head. “No. I’m not.”
“You are in one of the paintings though, aren’t you?” said the Asian woman at Salmon Tie’s side.
“Am I?”
She took the sheet from her companion’s hand and scanned the twenty or so titles upon it. “There,” she said. “D’Amour in Wyckoff Street. It’s the big painting next door,” she said to Salmon Tie, “with that bilious sky.”
 
; “Loathsome,” the man remarked. “Dusseldorf should go back to pushing heroin or whatever the hell he was doing. He’s got no business foisting this crap on people.”
“Ted didn’t push,” D’Amour said. He spoke softly, but there was no doubting the warning in his voice.
“I was simply stating my opinion,” the man said, somewhat defensively.
“Just don’t spread lies,” D’Amour said. “You’ll put the Devil out of work.”
It was July 8, a Friday, and the Devil was much on Harry’s mind tonight. New York was a stew as ever, and, as ever, Harry wished he could be out of the pot and away, but there was nowhere to go; nowhere he wouldn’t be followed and found. And here, at least, in the sweet-and-sour streets he knew so well, he had niches and hiding places; he had people who owed him, people who feared him. He even had a couple of friends.
One of whom was Ted Dusseldorf, reformed heroin addict, sometime performance artist, and now, remarkably, a painter of metropolitan apocalypses.
There he was, holding court in front of one of his rowdier pieces, all five foot nothing of him, dressed in a baggy plaid suit, and chewing on a contender for the largest damn cigar in Manhattan.
“Harry! Harry!” he said, laying eyes on D’Amour. “Thanks for coming.” He deserted his little audience and hooked his arm over Harry’s shoulder. “I know you hate crowds, but I wanted you to see I got myself some admirers.”
“Any sales?”
“Yeah, would you believe it? Nice Jewish lady, big collector, lives on the park, fancy address, buys that”—he jabbed his cigar in the direction of Slaughtered Lambs on the Brooklyn Bridge—“for her dining room. I guess maybe she’s a vegetarian,” he added, with a catarrhal laugh. “Sold a couple of drawings too. I mean, I ain’t gonna get rich, you know, but I proved something, right?”
“That you did.”
“I want you to see the masterwork,” Ted said, leading Harry through the throng, which was divided into three distinct camps. The inevitable fashion victims, here to be seen and noted in columns. A smattering of well-heeled collectors, slumming. And Ted’s friends, several of whom had tattoos as colorful as anything on the walls.
“I had this guy come up to me,” Ted said, “fancy shoes, designer haircut, he says: Fantasy’s so passé. I said: What fantasy? He looks at me like I farted. He says: These works of yours. I said: This isn’t fantasy. This is my life. He shakes his head, walks away.” Ted leaned closer to Harry. “I think sometimes there’s two different kinds of people in the world. The people who understand and the people who don’t. And if they don’t, it’s no use trying to explain, ’cause it’s just beyond them, and it always will be.”
There was an eight-by-six foot canvas on the wall ahead, its colors more livid and its focus more strident than anything else in the exhibition.
“You know, it keeps me sane, doin’ this shit. If I hadn’t started lettin’ all this out onto canvas, man, I’d have lost my fuckin’ mind. I don’t know how you keep your head straight, Harry. I really don’t. I mean, knowing what you know, seeing what you see . . . ”
The knot of people standing in front of the picture parted, seeing the artist and his model approach, giving them plain view of the masterpiece. Like most of the other works it too depicted a commonplace street. Only this was a street Harry could name. This was Wyckoff Street, in Brooklyn, where one sunny Easter Sunday almost a decade before Harry had first been brushed by infernal wings.
Ted had painted the street pretty much as it looked—drab and uncomfortable—and had placed the figure of D’Amour in the middle of the thoroughfare, regarding the viewer with a curious gaze, as if to say: Do you see what I see? At first glance it seemed there was nothing untoward about the scene, but further study gave the lie to that. Rather than simply accruing a host of disturbing details on the canvas, Ted had worked a subtler effect. He’d laid down a field of mushy scarlets and ochers, like the guts of an over-ripe pomegranate, and then stroked the details of Wyckoff Street over this seething backcloth, the grays and sepias of brick and iron and asphalt never completely concealing the rotted hues beneath, so that for all the carefully rendered detail, Wyckoff Street looked like a veil drawn over a more insistent and powerful reality.
“Good likeness, huh?” Ted said.
Harry assumed it was, given that he’d been recognized from it, but hell, it was less than comforting. He had good bones—Norma had told him so the first time she’d touched his face—but did they have to protrude quite so much? The way Ted had laid the paint down on Harry’s face he’d practically carved the features: long nose, strong jaw, wide brow and all. As for the marks of age, he hadn’t stinted. The gray hairs and the frown-lines were much in evidence. It wasn’t a bad face to be wearing into his forties, Harry supposed. Sure, there was none of the serenity that was rumored to be compensation for losing the bloom and ease of youth—his stare was troubled, the smile on his lips tentative to say the least—but it was a picture of a sane man with all his limbs and faculties intact, and of the people who’d wrestled with the beasts of the abyss, that pretty much put Harry in a league of one.
“Do you see it?” Ted said.
“See what?”
Ted brought Harry a couple of steps closer to the canvas and pointed to the lower half.
“There.” Harry looked. First at the sidewalk, then at the gutter. “Under your foot,” Ted prompted.
There, squirming under Harry’s right heel, was a thin black snake, with burning coals for eyes.
“The Devil Himself,” Ted said.
“Got him where I want him, have I?” Harry said.
Ted grinned. “Hey, it’s art. I’m allowed to lie a little.”
At Ted’s request, Harry hung around for an hour or so in the offices at the back of the gallery until the crowd had begun to thin. He put his feet up on the desk and flipped through a couple of old copies of the Times while he waited. It was good sometimes to remember how other people, ordinary people, lived their lives: entertained by political dog-fights and foreign misery; by scandal and frippery and murder. He envied them their ignorance, and the ease with which they idled their lives away. Right now, he would have given just about everything he had for a week of that bliss; a week going about trivial business for trivial reasons, forgetful of the presences that scurried beneath the surface of things.
They weren’t figments, these presences. He’d met them face to face (those that had faces) in alleyways and tenements and elevator shafts. Found them squatting in hospital garbage, sucking on soiled bandages; seen them in the mud at the river, eviscerating dogs. They were everywhere, and more arrogant by the day. It was only a matter of time, Harry knew, before they took the streets at noon. And when they did, they would be unopposed.
At the beginning of his career—when his investigations as a private detective had first led him into the company of the inhuman—he had entertained the delusion that he might with time help turn the tide against these forces by alerting the populous to their presence. He soon learned his error. People didn’t want to know. They had drawn the parameters of belief so as to exclude such horrors, and would not, could not, tolerate or comprehend anybody who sought to move the fences. Harry’s stumbling attempts to articulate all that he knew or suspected were met with derision, with rage, and, on one or two occasions, with violence. He quickly gave up trying to make converts, and resigned himself to a lonely war.
He wasn’t entirely without allies. In the course of the next few years he’d met a handful of people who had all in some fashion or other come to know what he knew. Of these few, none was more important to him than Norma Paine, the black blind medium who, though she never left her tiny two-room apartment on Seventy-fifth, had tales to tell from every corner of Manhattan, passed on to her by the spirits that came looking for guidance on their journey to the Hereafter. Then there’d been Father Hess, who had for a little time labored with Harry to discover the precise nature of the presences that haunted the city. Their work toget
her had come to an abrupt halt that Easter Sunday in Wyckoff Street, when one of those presences had sprung a trap on them both, and Hess had perished on the stairs while the triumphant demon sat on the bed where it had been found, speaking the same riddle to Harry over and over:
“I am you, and you are love, and that’s what makes the world go round. I am you, and . . . ”
In the years since that appalling day, Harry had never found an individual whose judgment he’d trusted as he’d trusted Hess’s judgment. Though Hess had been a fervent Catholic, he’d not let his faith narrow his vision. He’d been a keen student of all manner of religions, with a passion for life and its mysteries that had burned more brightly than in any soul Harry had encountered. A conversation with Hess had been like a trip on whitewater rapids: by turns dizzying and dangerous. One moment he was theorizing about black holes, the next extolling the virtues of peppered vodka, the next speaking in reverential tones about the mystery of the Virgin Birth. And somehow always making the connections seem inevitable, however unlikely they were at first glance.
There wasn’t a day went by Harry didn’t miss him.
“Congratulate me,” Ted said, appearing at the office door with a broad grin on his face, “I sold another piece.”
“Good for you.”
Ted slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He had a bottle of white wine in his hand. Squatting down against the wall, he sipped from it.
“Jeez, what a night,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion. “I almost canceled last week. I wasn’t sure I wanted people looking at what’s in my head.” He leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes, expelling a long, low breath. There was silence for perhaps half a minute. Then he said, “I got what you wanted, Harry.”
“Yeah?”
“I still think you’re out of your mind—”
“When’s the ceremony?”
“Next Tuesday.”