Everville

  She was dead; that much was sure. But the pen moved on, and kept moving. There was more to tell it seemed . . .

  The brightness into which she had fallen was still around her, though she knew it wasn’t her eyes that were seeing it, because she could see her own body some distance from her, suspended in the light. It lay face-up, arms and legs spread, fingers splayed, in a posture she knew all too well. She’d assembled this image in front of Buddenbaum, half an hour ago: It was the pose of the figure at the center of the medallion. Now it was her dead flesh that took that pose, while her mind drifted around it with a kind of detached curiosity, mildly puzzled as to what all this meant, but suspecting the answer was beyond her comprehension.

  In the ground a little way beneath her body—the source of the energies that had transformed the solid ground into a kind of incandescent soup—was the cross itself, and when her spirit looked its way it transported her thoughts in four directions at once, out along the bright paths that ran from its arms. In one direction lay the human journey; a record of the countless men and women who had come to and crossed at this intersection, all of them carrying their freight of dreams. In the opposite direction came a procession of creatures who resembled humanity, but only remotely; exiles from the Metacosm, come to Everville as a place of pilgrimage, and led by their prophetic marrow to this spot. From a third route came the animals, wild and domesticated alike. Leashed dogs sniffing for a place to piss; migrating birds wheeling overhead before they turned south; the flies that had been a curse to Dolan in his candy shop, the worms that had massed here in their many millions just the summer before. Aspiring forms, even the lowliest.

  And finally, the most remote element in this conjunction: the divinities whom she’d helped ensnare.

  “What happens next?” Rare Utu had waited to know as the blaze had consumed her. It was a question that no longer vexed Tesla. She had her bliss here and was perfectly content. If her consciousness finally caught up with the facts of her demise and flickered out, so be it. And if the pen continued to move, and the story continued to be told, she would accept that too, willingly.

  Meanwhile, she would hover, and watch, while the ground ran with brightness in every direction, and the steady processes of decay began their work on the body she’d once met in the mirror.

  * * *

  IV

  Harry was two blocks from the crossroads, heading off towards the place where the Iad was at work, when he heard Buddenbaum calling to him.

  “Help me, D’Amour!” he said, stumbling across the street. He had not, it appeared, left the site of his working completely bereft. A down of luminescence clung to his face and hands, an inconsequential reminder of all that he’d failed to acquire. “I don’t blame you,” he said, backing along the middle of the street ahead of Harry. “She was a friend of yours, so you had to conspire with her. You had no choice.”

  “There was no conspiracy, Buddenbaum.”

  “Whether there was or there wasn’t, you can’t leave her down there, can you?” He was attempting a tone of sweet reason.

  “She’s dead,” said Harry.

  “I know that.”

  “So wherever she’s buried, it’s academic. Will you just get the hell out of my way?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find Kissoon.”

  “Kissoon?” Buddenbaum said. “What the Hell good can he do you?”

  “More than you can.”

  “Not true!” Buddenbaum protested. “Just give me a few minutes of your time, and you’ll never look back. There’ll be no past to look back to. No future either. Just—”

  “One immortal day?” Harry shook his head. “Give it up, for God’s sake. You had your chance and you blew it.”

  He turned a corner now, and there, at the other end of the street, was the enemy. He halted for a moment, to try and make some sense of what he was seeing, but the closest of the fires was several streets away, and what illumination it offered only confounded his gaze. One thing was certain: The Iad was no longer the chaotic, panicked thing, or things, it had been on the mountaintop. Even from this distance and with so little light he could see that the enemy had sloughed off its ragged coat and moved in the air like a serpentine engine, its immense form in constant, peristaltic motion.

  Harry pulled up his sleeves, to expose his tattoos. Who knew what good they’d do him, probably very little. But he needed all the help he could get.

  “What are you going to do?” Buddenbaum wanted to know. “Challenge it to a fistfight? You don’t have a chance. Not without some power to wield.”

  Harry ignored him. Drawing a deep breath, he started down the street towards the Iad.

  “You think you’re being heroic, is that it?” Buddenbaum said. “It’s suicide. If you want to do some good, we can help each other. Dig for me, D’Amour.”

  “Dig?”

  Buddenbaum raised his hands in front of him. They were a sickening sight. In his frenzy to reclaim what he’d lost, he’d beaten his flesh to a bloody pulp. Several fingers were askew, their bones broken. “I can’t do it myself. And by the time they heal it’ll be too late.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” Harry said.

  “What the fuck do you know about what’s going to happen and what isn’t?”

  “If you were going to get the Art it would have come to you back there. But it didn’t.”

  “That was because of Tesla—”

  “Maybe. And maybe you just weren’t meant to have it.”

  Buddenbaum stopped in his tracks. “I won’t hear that,” he said.

  “So don’t,” Harry replied, stepping around him.

  “And I won’t be denied what’s mine!” Buddenbaum said, laying one of his broken hands on Harry’s shoulder. “I don’t have much in the way of suits left in me,” he said, “but I’ve got enough to cripple you. Maybe even kill you.”

  “And what good would that do you?”

  “I would have laid one of my enemies low,” Buddenbaum replied.

  Harry could feel a pulse of neuralgia pass through his shoulder from Buddenbaum’s palm, lending credence to the threat.

  “I’m going to give you one more chance,” Buddenbaum said.

  Harry’s tattoos started to itch furiously. His guts twitched. He knew he should run, but the will had gone from his legs.

  “What are you doing, Owen?” somebody said.

  The itch was an ache now, and the twitches almost convulsions. Harry tried to turn his head towards the speaker, but it wouldn’t move. All he could do was shift his eyes, and there on the periphery of his vision he saw the boy from the crossroads. His pallid face was bruised and bloodied.

  “Let him go, Owen,” he said. “Please.”

  Buddenbaum made a sound Harry couldn’t quite interpret. Was it perhaps a sob? “Stay away from me, Seth,” he said.

  “What happened?” the boy wanted to know.

  “I was cheated,” Buddenbaum replied, his voice thickening with tears. “I had it in my grasp—”

  “And this man took it?”

  “No!”

  “So, what? You’re just killing anybody who gets in your way? You’re not that cruel.”

  “I will be,” Buddenbaum said. “From now on, no mercy, no compassion—”

  “No love?”

  “No love!” he yelled. “So you stay away from me or I’ll hurt you too!”

  “No you won’t,” Seth said, his words a gentle certainty.

  Harry felt the pain in his body easing, and the power over his muscles was returned to him. He made no sudden movements, for fear of inflaming Buddenbaum afresh, but slowly turning his head he saw that Seth had lifted the man’s hand off Harry’s shoulder and had drawn it up to his lips.

  “We’ve all been hurt enough for one lifetime,” he said softly, kissing the broken hand. “We’ve got to start healing, Owen.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “Give me a chance to prove you wrong,” th
e boy replied.

  Harry looked round at Buddenbaum. His rage had passed, leaving his face drained of expression.

  “You’d better go,” Seth said to Harry.

  “Will you be all right with him?”

  “Sure,” Seth replied gently, slipping his arm around Buddenbaum’s shoulder. “We’ll be fine. We go way back, him and me. Way back.”

  There was no time for further exchange. Leaving the pair to make what peace they could, Harry headed on down the street. In the minute or so since he’d last looked the Iad’s way it had advanced against the largest building in the vicinity: either the courthouse or the Town Hall, Harry guessed. The site was no more than a hundred and fifty yards ahead of him, and now with every step the Iad’s pernicious influence grew. He felt its needles at the base of his skull, and the corners of his eyes; heard its witless noise behind the din of the world.

  It was almost welcome, that witlessness, given the alternative: the shrieks and screams coming from those trapped in the besieged building. He was puzzled as to why the victims didn’t escape out the back until he saw Gamaliel running down the side of the building with something that looked like a human head in his hand. If Gamaliel was here, so were his brothers, and probably the surviving members of Zury’s clan too: all here to enjoy the spectacle.

  So where was Kissoon? He’d masterminded this night of retribution; he was surely here to witness it.

  Shouting for Kissoon as he went, Harry broke into a run. It sounded strange to be calling a man’s name in the midst of such utter bedlam, but hadn’t it been Kissoon himself who’d said that whatever the Iad looked like they’d have a human heart? Men were not nameless. Every one of them had a past; even Kissoon, who had spoken so fondly of being nobody: just eyes on a mountain, looking down on a world of fishes . . .

  The walls of the Town Hall were cracking, as the great wheel of the Iad pressed against it. The closer Harry came to the place, the more the Iad’s name made sense. Uroboros, the self-devouring serpent, encircling the earth while it ate its own tail. An image of power as a self-sufficient engine: implacable, incomprehensible, inviolate.

  This time there were no hallucinations in its proximity—no Father Hess accusing from a makeshift grave, no demon spouting enigmas—just this ring of malice, cracking the shell that kept it from its victims. He saw it more clearly all the time. It seemed to him it was displaying itself, tormenting him with the fact that despite the clarity there was no comprehension to be had; no place where its intricacies resolved themselves into something recognizable: a head, a claw, an eye. Just shapes in nauseating abundance, flukes and scraps and scabs; hard forms of indeterminate color (bluish here, reddish there, or neither, or nothing); all soulless, all passionless.

  There was, of course, no human face here either. Only repetition, like a scrawl caught between mirrors, its echoes looking like order, like meaning, but being neither.

  He had to find the heart. That was his only hope: Find the heart.

  The noise in his head had grown so loud now he was sure it would burst his skull, but he kept walking towards its source, and the closer he came—sixty yards, fifty, forty—the more clearly he heard a whisper beneath the din. It was calm, this whisper.

  It’s nothing to be afraid of . . . he was telling himself.

  He was surprised at his own courage.

  Nothing you haven’t seen before . . .

  Surprised and reassured.

  Just let it embrace you . . .

  Wait, he thought; where did that idea come from?

  There’ll only be the two of us, very soon . . .

  That isn’t me. It’s the Iad.

  Oh, but there’s no way to divide us . . . the whisper replied, receding now that it had been identified, you know that, in your heart . . . it said, in your human heart . . .

  Then it was gone, and he was ten yards from the vast, slow wheel, the screams from the building drowned out by the mindless noise in his head. Off to his right he saw Gamaliel striding in his direction. It would slaughter him on the instant, he knew. No prayer, no hesitation. Just the killing stroke.

  He had seconds to live. Seconds to bring Kissoon to him.

  He drew a deep breath, and though he could no longer hear his own voice, yelled into the bedlam.

  “I’m looking for Clayton O’Connell!”

  There was no response at first. The wheel kept moving, senseless form upon senseless form passing in front of his exhausted eyes. And then, with Gamaliel a yard from him, its hands stretched to rip out his throat, the Iad’s motion began to slow. Some unheard order must have gone out, because Gamaliel stopped in mid-stride, and then retreated a little way.

  The din in Harry’s head retreated too—though it didn’t disappear—and he stood before the Iad gasping like a prisoner whose restraints had been loosened enough to let him breathe.

  There was some movement amid the Iad’s anatomy. It unknotted itself, parted. And there, enthroned in its entrails—which were the same incomprehensible stuff of its outward appearance—was Kissoon.

  He looked much as he had on the mountain: simple and serene.

  “How did you work out who I was?” he said. Though there was a considerable distance between them, his voice sounded as intimate as the Iad’s whispers.

  “I didn’t,” Harry said. “I was told.”

  “By whom?” Kissoon wanted to know, rising and stepping out of the living sanctum down onto the street. “Who told you?”

  “Your mother.”

  The face before him remained impassive. Not a twitch. Not a flicker.

  “Her name’s Maeve O’Connell, in case you’ve forgotten,” Harry said, “and she was hanged on a tree, alongside your father and you.”

  “You talk to the dead?” Kissoon said. “Since when?”

  “She’s not dead. She’s very much alive.”

  “What kind of trick is this?” Kissoon said. “You think it’s going to save anybody?”

  “She escaped, Clayton. The bough broke, and she found a way through to Quiddity.”

  “Impossible.”

  “The door was always up there, open just a crack.”

  “How could she have got through it?”

  “She had suits of her own, didn’t she? And the will to make them work. You should see what she’s done at the crossroads.” Harry glanced back over his shoulder. “That light . . . ” he said. There was a noticeable glow in the sky around the region of the whorehouse. “That’s her handiwork.”

  Kissoon gazed at it a moment, and Harry had the satisfaction of seeing a flicker of doubt upon his face. A tiny flicker, to be sure, but it was enough.

  “I . . . don’t know . . . about you, D’Amour. You keep surprising me.”

  “You and me both.”

  “If you’re lying about this—”

  “What would be the point?”

  “To delay me.”

  “Why would I bother?” Harry replied. “You’re going to do what you’re going to do sooner or later.”

  “And I still will,” Kissoon said. “Mother or no mother.” He stared on at the glow in the sky. “What’s she doing?” he said.

  “She reconstructed the whorehouse,” Harry said. “For old times’ sake.”

  Kissoon mused on this for a few moments. Then he said, “Old times? Fuck old times,” and without further word he strode off down the street towards the crossroads, leaving Harry to follow after him.

  Harry didn’t need to look back to know that the Iad had left off its assault on the Town Hall, and was also trailing after Kissoon, as though for all its legendary malevolence it didn’t have the will—or perhaps the desire—to act without instruction. The noise in Harry’s head had dwindled to a murmur, and he took a moment to turn over the options that lay ahead, assuming that the Iad was by now indifferent to his thought processes.

  Plainly, the possibility of his mother’s survival had done nothing to mellow Kissoon. He was going to meet her, it seemed, more out of curiosity tha
n sentiment. He had his agenda; he’d had it since childhood. The fact that the woman who’d brought him into the world had survived her lynching would not dissuade him from wanting that world filled with fishes. Harry entertained a remote hope that in the midst of the reunion Kissoon might lay himself open to attack, but even if he did, what weapon would touch him? And while an attempt upon his life was being made, would the Iad simply stand by and let it happen? Unlikely, to say the least.

  “It’s not what you expected, is it?” Kissoon said as they turned the corner. “The Iad, I mean.”

  Harry watched the great wheel appear behind them, its forms spilling and curling as it came, like a wave perpetually threatening to break. It seemed almost to usurp and transfigure the air on its way, turning the very darkness to its own purpose.

  “I don’t know what I expected,” Harry replied.

  “You had any number of Devils to choose from,” Kissoon pointed out. “But I don’t think this was one of them.” He didn’t wait for confirmation or denial. “It will change, of course. And change. And change. The one thing it will never be is dead.”

  Harry remembered Norma’s wisdom about the world. Was that true of the Iad too? Changing, but inextinguishable?

  “And of course it’s just a tiny part of what’s waiting on the other side.”

  “I’m glad I won’t be here to see it,” Harry said.

  “Are you giving up then? That’s wise. You don’t know up from down any longer, do you, and that fills you with terror. Better to surrender. Go watch TV until the end of the world.”

  “You hate the world that much?”

  “I was taken from a tree by wolves, D’Amour. I woke up in the dark with a rope around my neck being fought over. And when I’d gutted them—when I was standing among the bodies, drenched in their blood—I thought: These were not my enemies. These were not the creatures that took me naked from my bed, and hanged me. It’s their blood I have to bathe in. It’s their throats I have to take out. The question was: How? How was a half-crazy nobody, with a brothel-keeper for a mother and a drunken freak for a father to find a way to take out the throat of Sapas Humana?” He stopped. Turned. Smiled. “Now you know.”