Everville

“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 palpable manifestation of the harm it brought. A devourer’s tools, a torturer’s stare, 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 ear 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 crucifier 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 Iad comes—” Raul said.

  “I know. It’ll take hold of my head and fill it with shit.” There were already signs of the Iad’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.”

  “Then I’ll wish you luck,” 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 Iad’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 Iad’s influence upon his mind, however. He felt a wave of intense self-revulsion 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.

  “You never did understand.”

  He looked off to his right, and there, wedged in a fissure, his arms trapped at his sides, was Father Hess. He was wearing the wound Lazy Susan had given him all those years ago, and they were as fresh as if he’d just received them.

  “I’m not here to accuse you, Harry,” he said.

  “You’re not here, period,” Harry said.

  “Oh come on, Harry,” Hess said, “since when did that matter?” He grinned. “It’s not reality that causes the trouble, Harry. It’s illusions. You should have learned that by now.”

  That was all this was, Harry knew: an illusion. He was conjuring it up. Every word, every drop of blood. So why couldn’t he just tear his eyes from it and move on?

  “Because you loved me,” Hess said, as though Harry had asked the question aloud. “I was a good man, a loving man, but when it came down to it you couldn’t save me.” He coughed, bringing up a gruel of bilious water. “That must have been terrible,” he said. “To be so powerless.” It stared at Harry pityingly. “The truth is, you still are,” he said. “Still looking to see the Enemy clearly, just once, just once.”

  “Are you finished?” Harry said.

  “A little closer—” Hess begged.

  “What?”

  “Closer, I said.” Harry approached the martyr. “That’s better,” Hess said. “I don’t want this spread around.” He dropped his voice to a growl. “It’s all done with mirrors,” he said, and suddenly his arms sprang from the fissure and seized hold of Harry’s lapels. Harry wrestled to escape the illusion’s grip, but it dragged him down, inch by inch, and as it did so the flesh of its face seemed to slide away in ribbons. There was no bone beneath. Just a brownish pulp.

  “See?” it said, its mouth a lipless hole. “Mirror-men. Both of us.” br />
  “Fuck you!” Harry yelled, and pulling himself free of Hess’s grip he stumbled backwards.

  Hess shrugged and grinned. “You never did understand,” he said again. “I told you over and over and over and over—”

  Harry turned his back on the pulpy face.

  “And over and over—”

  And looked back towards the door. He had a second, perhaps two, to realize that the Iad, or some part of it, was no longer in that world but this. Then the ground around the Uroboros rose up in a solid wall and all that had gone before—the din, the tremors, the revulsion—seemed like a dream of perfect peace.

  * * *

  III

  It was the ride of Phoebe’s life: cocooned in a stony womb, and carried in the grip of the rock as it rose to block the Iad’s way. Texas had promised she’d be safe, and safe she was, her capsule borne through the convulsing ground and up on fountains of liquid rock with such ease she could have threaded a needle had she wished to take her eyes off the sight he was showing her. The rock was a protean face, shaped and driven by his will. One moment she was plunged into grottoes where the Quiddity ran in icy darkness, the next the strata were dividing before her life so many veils, the next she seemed to be in the midst of a vital body, with liquid rock blazing in its veins, and the King’s fossil heart beating like thunder all around.

  Sometimes she heard his voice in the walls of her womb, telling her not to be afraid.

  She wasn’t. Not remotely. She was in the care of living power, and it had made her a promise she believed.

  The Iad, on the other hand, for all its motion and its purpose, reminded her of death. Or rather, of its prelude: of the torments and the hopelessness she’d seen death bring. As it approached the door, and the earth rose up to block its passage, the rock pierced it and clusters of dark matter, almost like eggs, spilled from it, all the fouler for their glittering multiplicity. Even if they were eggs, Phoebe thought, there was death in every gleaming one. When they struck the shore they burst and their gray fluids raced over the stones as if nosing out the darkness beneath.

  Wounded though it was, its appetite for the Cosm was not dulled. Besieged by the rock, it continued to advance, though the very shore it was crossing had become a second sea, a surf of stone rising up to drive it back.

  It was difficult for Phoebe to make out quite what was happening in the chaos, but it seemed that the Iad had pressed a portion of its body towards the threshold and was in the act of crossing over when Texas raised a wall of earth with such speed that he severed the questing limb from the main. The Iad let out a sound the like of which Phoebe had never heard in her life, and as it was reeling in its anguish the whole landscape laid before her—highway, dunes, and shore—was simply upended. She saw the Iad topple, bursting in a thousand places, spilling its substance, as what had been horizontal moments before rose in a vertical mass above the enemy. It teetered there a long moment. Then it descended upon the Iad—a solid sky, falling and falling—driving the wounded mass into the pit where the shore had been.

  Even as this spectacle unfolded, Phoebe felt the cocoon shudder, and she was carried away from the maelstrom at speed, deposited at last close to the city limits, where the shore was still intact. She had no sooner come to rest than the cocoon cracked and deteriorated, leaving her exposed. Though she was perhaps two miles from the doorway, the ground was shaking violently and a hail of rock fragments was falling all around, some of the shards big enough to do her damage. Texas had exhausted all his strength, she assumed, to do what he’d done. She could not expect his protection any longer. She got to her feet, though it was difficult to stand upright and, shielding her head with her hands, she stumbled back in the direction of the city.

  She returned her gaze along the shore once in a while, but the rain of dust and stones went on relentlessly, and she could see very little through the pall.

  Nothing of the Iad, certainly, nor of the door through which she’d stepped to come into this terrible world.

  Both had disappeared, it seemed: enemy and door alike.

  * * *

  IV

  The first casualty on the Heights was Zury, who had been standing at the threshold when the shore on the other side erupted. Caught by a blast of fractured rock he was thrown back into the liquefied ground. His acolytes went to dig him out while the Iad’s vanguard, severed from the main by the wall, thrashed in its fury, stirring earth and air alike into chaos. Overturned in the dirt, the Blessedm’n’s rescuers drowned along with their master. As for the Iad, though it was but a small part of the invader, it was still immense: a ragged, roiling mass of forms, spilling its blood in the neirica’s vestibule. The crack convulsed from end to end, as though the violence done in its midst was unmaking it. On the far side, earth and sky seemed to switch places. Then a storm of stones descended, the crack closed like a slammed door, and all that was left on the Heights was chaos on chaos.

  Harry had been flung to the shuddering ground before the Iad appeared and, certain he would be flung down again if he attempted to rise, stayed where he was. From this vantage point he saw Kissoon walk on the liquefied rock towards the wounded Iad. He seemed indifferent to the tremors, and fearless, his head thrown back to study the invader in its frenzy. It seemed to be unraveling. Pieces of its substance, ten, fifteen feet in length were spiraling skyward, trailing sinew; other fragments, the smallest the size of a man, the largest ten times that, were circling in the air, as though hungry to devour themselves. Others still had dropped to the fluid ground, and were immersing themselves in the dirt.

  Kissoon reached into his coat, and pulled from its folds the rod Harry had seen him wield in the Zyem Carasophia’s chamber. It had been a weapon then. But now, when he raised it above his head, it seemed to offer a point of focus for the Iad. They closed upon it from all directions, their torn bodies spilling their filth upon him. He raised his face to meet it as though it were a spring rain.

  Harry could watch this no longer. His head was awash with images of the dead and death, his eyes stinging from the sight of Kissoon bathing in the Iad’s filth. If he didn’t go now, despair would have him. He crawled away on his belly, barely aware of his direction, until the crosses came in sight, stark against the sky. He had not expected to see them again, and his aching eyes filled with tears.

  “You came back,” said a voice out of the darkness. It was Raul.

  “And . . . you stayed,” Harry said.

  Raul came to his side and, crouching, gently coaxed Harry to his feet. “I was curious,” he said.

  “The door’s closed.”

  “I saw.”

  “And the Iad that’s here—”

  “Yes?”

  Harry cleared the tears from his eyes, and stared up at the cross where he’d come so close to being nailed. “It bleeds,” he said, and laughed.

  NINE

  I

  In Everville, the denial had stopped, and so had the music. Not even those so drunk with liquor or love they’d forgotten their names could pretend all was well with the world. There was something happening on the mountain. It shook the sky. It shook the streets. It shook the heart.

  Some of the celebrants had come out into the open air to get a better look at the Heights and exchange theories as to what was at hand. Some of the proffered explanations were rational, some ludicrous. It was an earth tremor, it was a meteor crashing. It was a landing from the stars, it was an eruption from the earth.

  We should get out of here, said some, and began their hurried departures.

  We should stay, said others, and see if something happens we’ll remember for the rest of our lives . . .

  Alone in the now-vacated Nook, Owen Buddenbaum sat and obsessed on Tesla Bombeck. She had been a late addition to this drama but now she was beginning to look distressingly like its star.

  He knew her recent history, of course. He’d made it his business. She hadn’t proved herself any great visionary, as far as he could gather; nor had she
shown evidence of any thaumaturgical powers. Tenacious she was; oh yes, certainly that. But then so were terriers. And—though it didn’t please him to grant her this—she had a measure of raw courage, along with an appetite for risk.

  There was one story about her that nicely illuminated those aspects of her nature. It had Bombeck bargaining with Randolph Jaffe in or under the ruins of Palomo Grove. By this stage of events Jaffe had failed in his aspirations as an Artist and was reduced, so the story went, to a volatile lunatic. She had needed his help. He had been loath to give it. She’d goaded him, however, until he’d handed her one of the medallions like that buried under the crossroads, and told her that if she comprehended its significance within a certain time period she would have his help. If she failed, he would kill her.

  She’d accepted the challenge, of course, and had succeeded in decoding the cross; thus making the Jaff her ally, at least for a time. The fact that she’d worked out what the symbols meant was not of any great significance in Buddenbaum’s estimation. The fact that she’d put her life on the line while she grappled with the problem was.

  A woman who would take such a risk was more dangerous than a visionary spirit. If Seth brought her to him, he would have to be ready to dispatch her at the flicker of an eye—

  * * *

  II

  Tesla was halfway down the path to Phoebe’s front door before she saw the figure rising from the step.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. It was the boy from the crossroads; Buddenbaum’s sallow apprentice. “I’m Seth,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s not really what I want—”

  “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested,” she said, “I’ve got a baby here needs tending to.”

  “Let me help,” Seth replied. There was something almost pitiful in his appeal. “I’m good with kids.”