Everville

  “Now I know.”

  “One question for you, D’Amour, before we get there.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tesla Bombeck.”

  “What about her?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Dead.”

  Kissoon studied Harry for a little time, as if looking for some sign of deception. Finding none, he said, “She was quite remarkable, you know. I look back on our time together in the Loop almost fondly.” He made a tiny smile at the foolishness of this. “Of course finally she was a featherweight. But disarming, in her way.” He paused, staring past Harry at the Iad. “Do you know why it eats its own tail?” he said.

  “No.”

  “To prove its perfection,” Kissoon replied, and turning his back on Harry strode on to the next intersection. Turning it, they finally came in sight of the crossroads, and of the house that Maeve had built there. It looked almost solid; like a drawing made of light, worked over and over and over again, obsessively. A figure added here, a window there; some steps, some guttering; memory upon memory. Kissoon made no audible response to the spectacle, but proceeded towards it, his stride somewhat slower than it had been.

  “Where’s my mother?” he wanted to know.

  “Somewhere inside, I suppose,” Harry replied.

  “Go fetch her for me. I don’t want to go in.”

  “It’s just an illusion,” Harry said.

  “I know that,” Kissoon replied. Was there a subtle tremor in his voice? Again he said, “I want you to go fetch her for me.”

  “Okay,” Harry replied, and walked on past Kissoon to the front steps.

  The door before him seemed to stand open, and he slipped through it into a kind of erotic wonderland. The walls were covered with brocade now, and hung with paintings, most of them titillative works passing themselves off as classical subjects: The Judgement of Paris, Leda and the Swan, The Rape of the Sabine Women. And all around him, the feminine flesh so lovingly daubed on these canvases rendered in light, seemingly more real than when he’d left. Women in their camisoles and knickers, chattering in the parlor. Women with their hair unbraided, bathing their breasts. Women lying in bed, their hands between their legs, toying and smiling for their phantom clients.

  Moving down the thronged passageway in search of Maeve, Harry’s spirits rose, despite all that reason dictated. Doubtless life had been hard here. There had been disease and brutality and bastard children. Doubtless these women had endured the contempt of the very men who’d paid for their services, and longed, while they plied their trade, to escape. But that was not recorded here. It was the joy of this house Maeve had chosen to remember, and though Harry knew none of this was permanent it didn’t matter. He accepted the pleasure this illusion offered him with gratitude.

  “Harry?”

  There, in the kitchen, idling in the midst of a group of chattering women, was Raul. “Where did you get to?”

  “I went to find Maeve’s offspring. Where is she?”

  “She’s out back,” Raul said. “Did you say offspring?”

  “Kissoon, Raul,” Harry said, heading on towards the back of the house. “He’s Clayton O’Connell.” Raul came after him, forsaking the company of the women.

  “Does he know?” he said.

  “Of course he knows! Why wouldn’t he?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just . . . it’s difficult imagining Maeve’s kid being the one who murdered the Shoal, or created the Loop—”

  “Everyone begins somewhere,” Harry said to him. “And everyone has their reasons.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “At the front of the house,” Harry replied, “with the Iad.” He was out the back door now, into the garden. Maeve had remembered it the way it must have looked some distant spring, the cherry trees heavy with blossom, the air as heady as liquor. She wasn’t alone out here. One of the women was sitting on the grass, star-watching.

  “Her name’s Christina,” Maeve said. “She knows all the constellations.”

  “I’ve found Clayton,” Harry told Maeve.

  “You’ve what?”

  “He’s here.”

  “Impossible,” she said. “Impossible. My son’s dead.”

  “It might be better for us all if he was,” Harry replied. “He’s the one who brought the Iad through, Maeve. It’s his revenge for what happened to you all.”

  “And . . . are you expecting me to teach him some compassion?”

  “If you can.”

  She looked away. First to the star-watcher, then up to the stars. “I was having such a time out here. It was almost as though I’d never left—”

  “He wants me to bring you to him.”

  She looked towards Raul, who was standing on the back doorstep. “Is my Coker here?” Raul nodded. “So he knows?” Again, Raul nodded. “And what does he think?”

  Raul listened for the dead man to speak. “He says be careful; the boy was always wicked.”

  “Not always,” Maeve said quickly, moving back towards the house. “He wasn’t wicked in my belly. We taught him, Coker. Lord knows how, but we taught him.”

  She stepped inside, her face stony, and refusing Harry’s aid made her way back through the kitchen and the parlor towards the front door.

  It was still open. Kissoon was at the threshold, and by the stare on his face it was clear he’d been watching his mother for some time, through the veils of the whorehouse. The monkish face he’d worn was tainted now. He looked pinched and bitter.

  “Look at you,” he said, as Maeve approached the door.

  “Clayton?” she said, halting to study him.

  “How sick you look,” the sight of her frailty apparently giving him courage. He stepped inside. “You should be dead, Mama,” he said.

  “So should you.”

  “Oh,” he cooed, “I am, Mama. All that’s left alive is the hate in me.” He was picking up his speed, raising his left hand as he closed on her. In it, the rod he’d wielded twice before, the murderous rod.

  Yelling a warning, Harry raced to intercept the blow, but Kissoon was too quick. He struck his mother’s head with the rod, and down she went, an arc of blood splashing on the carpeted ground.

  In the bright grave below, Tesla felt the murder like a second death. Her spirit shaken, she looked up to see a stain spreading across her sky, while a woman’s voice unleashed a sob of agony. . . .

  Harry caught hold of Kissoon’s arm, and tried to pull him away from his mother, but the man was too strong. With a simple shrug he flung Harry off him, sending him stumbling through the gossamer walls to land on his back beneath the kitchen table. As he got to his feet he saw Raul throw himself upon Kissoon, but his assault was of such little consequence Kissoon didn’t bother to dislodge his attacker. He simply fell to his knees beside Maeve, his rod raised to finish his matricide. Once, twice, three, four times the weapon fell, the house shaking with each blow as the mind that had conjured it was snuffed out.

  By the time Harry reached Kissoon it was over. Spattered with Maeve’s blood, his eyes spilling tears, he hauled himself to his feet. He wiped his nose like any backstreet thug, and said to Harry, “Thank you. I enjoyed that.”

  Tesla didn’t want to hear. Didn’t want to move. Didn’t want anything but to float here as long as this limbo would have her.

  But the cruelty came down from above, loud and clear, and try as she might she couldn’t keep the anger from burgeoning in her. Her agitation informed the ground around her, and its motion drove her back towards her floating body. The closer she came to it the more frenzied the energies surrounding her became. They were eager for this reunion, she realized; they wanted her returned into her flesh.

  And why? She had the answer the moment she slid back into the space behind her eyes. It wanted to make her heart leap. It wanted to make her lungs draw breath. And most of all, it wanted to come into her living body, and let that body be the crux of all that flowed here. A place where the mind could make sense
of the flesh’s confusions. A place where beasts and divinities could be dissolved, and get about the work of oneness.

  In short, it wanted to give her the Art.

  And there was no refusing it. She knew the moment it passed into her that the gift was also a possession. That she would be changed in ways that were presently unimaginable to her, changes that made the difference between life and death look like a nuance.

  There was perhaps a moment between the first heartbeat and the second, when she might have rejected the gift, and fled her body. Let it die again, and wither. But before she quite realized the choice was hers, she’d chosen.

  And the Art had her.

  * * *

  “What is this?” Kissoon said, watching as the ground on which his mother’s body lay was pierced and a thousand pinprick shafts of light broke from it.

  Harry had no answers. All he could do was watch while the spectacle escalated, the old woman’s corpse withering where it lay, as if the light—which gave off no discernible heat—was cremating it. If so, it was as adept a creator as destroyer, for even as Maeve O’Connell’s corpse went to ash, another form, another woman, was resurrected in the midst of her pyre.

  “Tesla?”

  She looked like a tapestry sewn from fire, but it was her. God in Heaven, it was her!

  Harry heard the drone of the Iad in his skull turn to the lowing of a fretful animal. Kissoon was retreating towards the front door, clearly as spooked as his faceless ally, but before he could reach the threshold Tesla called to him by name. Her voice was no more mellifluous for her transfiguration.

  “This is unforgivable,” she said, the fire threads embers now; her body almost her own. “Here, of all places, where both of us were born.”

  “Both of us?” said Kissoon.

  “I am born here and now,” she said. “And you are a witness to that, which is no little honor.”

  The troubled din of the Iad was continuing to escalate through this exchange, and now, staring past Kissoon into the darkness beyond the faltering walls, Harry saw its abstractions unknitting, its wheel fragmenting.

  “Are you doing that?” Harry said to Tesla.

  “Maybe,” she said, looking down at her body, which was more solid by the moment. She seemed particularly interested in her hands. It took Harry only an instant to work out why. She was remembering the Jaff, whose hands had blazed with the Art. Blazed, then broken.

  “Buddenbaum was right,” Harry said.

  “About what?”

  “You and the Art.”

  “I didn’t plan it this way,” she said, her tone a mingling of puzzlement and distress. “If he hadn’t shed blood—”

  She looked up from her hands, back at Kissoon, who had retreated to the place where the door had once stood. Its conjured memory was barely visible now. As for the Iad, its forms turned in the air behind him, drawing the darkness into their loops as they circled, sealing themselves in shadow. Soon, they were just places where the stars failed to shine. Then not even that.

  “This is the beginning of the end,” Kissoon said.

  “I know,” Tesla replied, with a ghost of a smile on her face.

  “You should be afraid,” Kissoon told her.

  “Why? Because you’re a man capable of killing his own mother?” She shook her head. “The world’s been full of scum like you from the beginning,” she said quietly. “And if the end means there’s no more to come, then that’s not going to be much of a loss, is it?”

  He stared at her for a few seconds, as if searching for some riposte. Finding none, he simply said, “We’ll see . . . ” and turning into the same darkness that had taken the Iad, he was gone.

  There was another silence then, longer than the one before, while the walls of the whorehouse grew ever more insubstantial. Harry went down on his haunches, his eyes pricking with tears of relief, while the last dreg of the Iad’s drone faded and disappeared from the bones of his head. Tesla, meanwhile, wandered a few yards from the place where she’d appeared—which now looked like any other spot in the street—and stared towards the fires. There were sirens whooping in the distance. The saviors were on their way with hoses, lights, and words of reason.

  “How does it feel?” Harry asked her.

  “I’m . . . trying to pretend nothing’s happened to me,” Tesla replied, her voice a gravelly whisper. “If I take it slowly . . . very slowly . . . maybe I won’t get crazy.”

  “So it’s not like they say—?”

  “I can’t see the past, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What about the future?”

  “Not from where I’m standing.” She drew a deep breath. “We haven’t told that story yet. That’s why.” There was a peal of laughter from the direction of the garden. “Your friend sounds happy,” she said.

  “That’s Raul.”

  “Raul?” A tentative smile appeared on Tesla’s face. “That’s Raul? Oh my Lord, I thought I’d lost him . . . . ” She faltered, as her gaze found Raul, standing among the last of the blossoming trees. “Look at that,” she said.

  “What?” said Harry.

  “Oh, of course,” she said, “I’m seeing with death’s eyes.” She pondered for a moment. “I wonder . . . ?” she said finally, raising her hand in front of her, index and middle fingers extended. “Do you want to try something?”

  Harry got to his feet. “Sure.”

  “Come here.”

  He came to her, a little trepidatiously. “I don’t know if this is going to work or not,” she warned. “But who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  She laid her fingers lightly against his jugular. “Do you feel anything?” she said.

  “You’re cold.”

  “That’s all, huh? Okay, let’s try . . . here.” This time, she touched his forehead. “Still cold?” she said. He didn’t reply. Just winced a little. “You want me to stop?”

  “No,” he said. “No, it’s . . . just . . . strange—”

  “Take another look at Raul,” she said.

  He turned his eyes in the direction of the trees and a gasp of delight escaped him.

  “You can see them?”

  “Yes,” he smiled. “I can see them.”

  Raul was not in the fading garden alone. Maeve was standing close by him, no longer wrapped in drear and mist but clothed in a long, pale dress. The years had fallen from her. She was in her prime; a handsome woman of forty or so, standing arm in arm with a man who surely had lion in his lineage. He too was dressed for a summer evening, and gazed upon his wife as though this was the first hour of their courtship, and he hopelessly in love.

  There was a fourth member of this unlikely group. Another phantom—Erwin Toothaker, Harry supposed—dressed in a shapeless jacket and baggy pants, watching from a little distance as the lovers exchanged their tender glances.

  “Shall we join them?” Tesla said. “We’ve got a few minutes before people start to come sightseeing.”

  “What happens when they do?”

  “We won’t be here,” Tesla replied. “It’s time for us all to put our lives in order, Harry, whether we’re dead, living, or something else entirely. It’s time to make our peace with things, so we’re ready for whatever happens next,” she said.

  “And you don’t know what that’ll be?”

  “I know what it won’t be,” she said, leading the way into the garden.

  “And what’s that?” he asked, following her through a spiraling shower of petals.

  “Like anything we’ve ever dreamed.”

  PART SEVEN

  LEAVES ON THE STORY TREE

  ONE

  I

  Everville’s weekend of portents and manifestations did not go unnoticed. In the days immediately following the events of Festival Saturday and Sunday morning the city came under the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for communities that have produced mass murderers or presidential candidates. Something of strange consequence had happened there, nobody contested that. But nor cou
ld anybody quite decide what, not even those who’d been in the thick of it. In fact the people who should in principle have been the most reliable witnesses (those who’d been at the crossroads on Saturday afternoon; those trapped in the Town Hall around two on Sunday morning) were in one sense the least useful. Not only did they contradict one another, they contradicted themselves from hour to hour, recollection to recollection, their talk of quakes and fires and rock falls mingled with details so farfetched as to turn the story into tabloid fodder within a week.

  No sooner had these details found print—along with the inevitable comparisons to other sites of outlandish bloodshed like Jonestown and Waco—than the city came under scrutiny from a very different selection of examiners—psychics, UFO-ologists, and New Age apocalyptics—their vocal presence further damaging the legitimacy of the story. Television coverage that had been sympathetic on Tuesday was getting wary or even cynical by the end of the week. Time magazine pulled a cover piece on the tragedy before it reached the presses, replacing it with a story inside that implied the whole event had been a publicity stunt that had spiraled out of control. The piece was accompanied by an unfortunate, and deeply unflattering, portrait of Dorothy Bullard, who’d been persuaded to be photographed in her nightgown, and was immortalized standing behind her screendoor looking like a lost soul under home arrest. The piece was entitled: Is America Losing Its Mind?

  There was no denying that people had perished the previous weekend, of course, many of them horribly. The body count finally reached twenty-seven, including the manager of the Sturgis Motel and the three bodies discovered on the road outside the city, two of them burned beyond recognition, the third that of a sometime-journalist called Nathan Grillo. There were autopsies; there were overt and covert investigations by the police and FBI; there were public pronouncements as to the various causes of death. And of course there was gossip, some of which made it into the tabloids, much of which did not. The story that two skins made of some imitative alien substance were found at the motel did make the pages of the Enquirer. The rumor that three crosses had been found close to the summit of Harmon’s Heights, with bodies crucified on two of them and a body of some unearthly creature slumped at the foot of the third did not.