Everville

  In the second week of reporting, with the loonier opiners and witnesses ever more voluble, and the Time interpretation of events gaining adherents daily, the story took on a new lease of life with the suicide of one of Everville’s most beloved citizens: Bosley Cowhick.

  He was found in the kitchen of his diner at six-fifteen on Wednesday morning, a week and three days after Festival Weekend. He had shot himself, leaving, beside the cash register, a note, the contents of which were leaked to the press the following day, despite Jed Gilholly’s best efforts to keep Bosley’s last words under wraps.

  The note bore no address. There were just a few rambling and ill-punctuated lines scrawled on the back of a menu.

  I hope the Lord will forgive me for what I’m doing, he’d written, but I can’t go on living any more with all these things in my head. I know people are saying I’m crazy, but I saw what I saw and maybe I did wrong, but I did it for the sake of the baby. Seth Lundy knows that’s true. He saw it too and he knows I had no choice, but I keep thinking that God put her into my hands to test me and I was not strong enough to do His will even if I did it for the best. I don’t want to live any more thinking about it all the time. I have faith that the Lord will understand and be with me because He made me and He knows that I have always tried to do His will. Just sometimes it’s too much. I’m sorry for hurting anybody. Goodbye.

  Inevitably, the mention of Seth Lundy in this pitiful missive set a whole new trail of inquiries in motion, as Lundy was one of the people who was listed as missing after the weekend. Bill Waits admitted witnessing the Lundy boy being assaulted by two of his fellow musicians, but that story remained uncorroborated. One of those two men, Larry Glodoski, was dead under highly suspicious circumstances, while the other, Ray Alstead, was in custody in Salem, suspected of his murder. He was being kept sedated, to minimize his eruptions of violence, which seemed to be associated with a fear that the deceased would be coming to find him because he’d seen more than he was supposed to see. Quite what he’d witnessed he would not say, but his obsession with the vengeful dead strengthened the belief among the police psychiatrists that he might well have been responsible for a number of the slaughters that night. He had gone on a rampage, the theory went, and was now in terror that his victims would come to claim him. Waits explicitly denied this—he’d been with Alstead most of the evening, he pointed out—but he’d also been in a highly intoxicated state for much of that time so he was not the most reliable of witnesses.

  Now, with the death of Bosley Cowhick, the authorities lost a potentially useful witness and were left with another collection of puzzles. What had happened to Seth Lundy? Who exactly was this child that the God-fearing Bosley had felt so guilty for relinquishing? And, if the baby had even existed, to whom had he relinquished her?

  There were no answers to any of these questions forthcoming in the short term. Bosley Cowhick was buried in the Potter Cemetery, alongside his mother, father, and maternal grandmother; Ray Alstead remained in a cell in Salem, while his lawyer fought to have him released on grounds of insufficient evidence; and as nobody came forward to report a missing baby, the child remained unidentified. As for the disappearance of Seth Lundy, it opened up what was in a sense to be the last of the Everville Mysteries to reach the eyes and ears of the general public, and that surrounded the figure of Owen Buddenbaum. Unlike the baby, nobody doubted Buddenbaum’s existence. He’d been seen falling from a window, he’d been examined at Silverton Hospital, he’d been in the midst of events on the afternoon of Festival Saturday, which had ended in such turmoil, and he had still been in the city after nightfall, his presence noted and reported by several people. Indeed, he seemed to have been a constant factor in the weekend’s events, so much so that in some quarters he was suggested to have been at the center of the whole cycle of events: the grand master, lording it over what was either a misbegotten hoax, a paranormal phenomenon, or a case of mass hysteria, depending on your point of view. If he could be found, it was widely believed, and persuaded to speak, he would be able to solve most, if not all, the unanswered questions.

  A passable artist’s likeness was made and appeared in several national magazines, as well as in both the Oregonian and the Everville Register. Almost immediately, the reports began to come back in. He had been seen in Louisiana two years before; he’d been sculling around a pool in Miami, just last week; he’d been spotted at Disneyland, moving through the crowd watching the Electric Parade. There were literally dozens of such sightings, some of them going back more than a decade, but even when the witness had had occasion to interact with the mysterious Mr. Buddenbaum there was little hard evidence about him. He certainly didn’t speak of miracles or Mars or the secret workings of the world. He came and went, leaving behind him the vague sense of somebody who didn’t belong in this day and age.

  These reports, numerous though they were, were not weird enough to keep Everville’s story in the public eye. Once all the funerals were over, and the photographers had been up Harmon’s Heights to see the summit (which had been so thoroughly scoured by the authorities there was nothing left to photograph but the view); once the Bosley Cowhick suicide had been recounted, and the Owen Buddenbaum sightings run, the tale of Everville ran out of fuel.

  By the end of September it was stale, and a month later it was the stuff of Halloween tales, or forgotten.

  * * *

  II

  I am born here and now, Tesla had said to Kissoon as she’d stood in the dwindling remains of Maeve O’Connell’s house, and that had been the truth. The very ground which she’d assumed would be her grave had proved to be a womb, and she’d risen from it remade. Little wonder then that the weeks that followed resembled a second childhood, far stranger than her first.

  As she’d told D’Amour, she felt little sense of revelation. The gift that she’d inadvertently received, or—and she did not discount this possibility—unconsciously pursued, had not given her any great insights into the structure of reality. Or if it had she was not yet resilient enough to open herself up to their presence. Even the minor miracle she’d worked in the whorehouse that night—allowing Harry to see with the eyes of the dead—now seemed foolhardy. She would not be tempted to go around bestowing such visions on people again; not until she was certain she had control of what she was doing, and that certainty, she suspected, would be a long time coming. Her mind felt more closed down now than it had before her resurrection, as though she had instinctively narrowed her field of vision when the prospect of infinite horizons loomed for fear her thoughts would take flight and she would lose her grip on who she was completely.

  Now she was back in her old apartment in West Hollywood, where she had headed immediately after leaving Everville, not because she’d ever felt ecstatically happy there—she hadn’t—but because she needed the comfort of the familiar. Many of the neighbors’ faces had changed, but the comedies and dramas that surrounded her were essentially the same after five years. Every Saturday night the pre-op transsexual in the apartment below would get maudlin and play torch songs until four in the morning; at least twice a week the couple in the next building would have screaming matches ending in verbally explicit reconciliations; every day somebody’s cat was sick on the stairs. It was less than glamorous, but it was home, and there in that cramped apartment with its cheap furniture and its cracked plaster walls she could pretend, at least for a time, that she was a normal woman living a normal life. Not perhaps the kind of normality Middle America would have recognized, but a reasonable approximation. She’d nurtured her hopes here and wasted time she could have used realizing them. She’d tended her wounded ego when a piece of work had been rejected. Tended it too when love had dealt her a blow. When she’d caught Claus cheating; when Jerry had left for Miami and never come back. Hard times, some of them. But the memories helped remind her of who she was, scars and all. Right now that was more important than the pleasures of self-deception.

  Of course this was also the apartment
where Mary Muralles had perished in the coils of Kissoon’s Lix, and where she and Lucien—poor, guiltless Lucien—had talked about how people were vessels for the infinite. It was a phrase she had never forgotten. She might have thought it a kind of prophecy had she not believed what she’d told D’Amour: that the future always remained untold and thus untellable. Prophecy or no, the fact remained that she had become a kind of vessel for what had always been touted as an infinite power. Now she had it, she was determined not to be destroyed by it. She would learn to use the Art as Tesla Bombeck, or let it lie fallow inside her.

  Once in a while during this period of restoration she would get a call from Harry in New York, checking in to see that all was well. He was sweetly considerate of her tender condition, and their exchanges were for the most part determinedly banal. They never quite stooped to talking politics, but he kept his side of the conversation light and general, waiting for her to deepen the exchange if she felt resilient enough. She seldom did. Most of the time they chatted about nothing in particular and left it at that. But as the weeks went by she started to feel more confident of her strength, and dared to talk, albeit tentatively, of what had happened in Everville, and its long-term consequences. Had he heard anything of the whereabouts of the Iad, for instance? Or of Kissoon? (The answer to both these questions was no.) What about Tommy-Ray, or Little Amy? (Again, the answer was no.)

  “Everybody’s keeping their heads down’s my guess,” Harry said. “Licking their wounds. Waiting to see who moves first.”

  “You don’t sound all that bothered,” Tesla said.

  “You know what? I think Maeve had it right. She said to me: If you don’t know what’s ahead of you, why be scared of it? There’s a lot of sense in that.”

  “There’s also a lot of people gone, Harry, who had good reason to be scared.”

  “I know. I’m not trying to pretend it’s all sunshine and flowers. It isn’t and I know it isn’t. But I’ve spent so much of my life looking for the Enemy—”

  “And now you’ve seen it.”

  “Now I’ve seen it.”

  “And it sounds like you’re smiling.”

  “I am. Shit, I don’t even know why, but I am, I’m smiling. You know, Grillo used to tell me I was being simpleminded about all this shit, and we kinda fell out about it, but I hope to God he’s hearing me, because he was right, Tes. He was right.”

  The conversation more or less petered out there, but Harry’s mention of Grillo started her thinking of him, and once she’d begun there was no stopping. Until now she’d actively feared the thought of dealing with her feelings for him, certain she risked her hard-won self-possession if she was drawn into those troubled waters. But caught off-guard like this, obliged to let the memories snowball or be mowed down trying to halt them, she surrendered herself, and after all her trepidation, it was not so bad. In fact it was rather comforting, bringing him to mind. He’d changed radically in the eight years she’d known him: lost most of his idealism and all of his certainties and gained an obsession in their place. But under his increasingly prickly exterior, the man she had first met—charming, childish, irascible—remained visible, at least to her. They had never been lovers, and once in a while she’d regretted the fact. But there had never been a man in her life so constant as Grillo, or in the end so unalloyed in his affections. Even in more recent times, when she’d been traveling, and sometimes months would go by without their speaking, it had never taken more than a sentence or two between them before they were talking as though minutes had passed since their last exchange.

  Recalling those long-distance conversations from truckstop diners and backroad gas stations, her thoughts turned to the labor that had consumed Grillo in the half-decade since Palomo Grove: the Reef. He had described it to her more than once as the work which he’d been put on the planet to perform, and though it demanded more energies and more patience than he had sometimes feared he was capable of supplying, he had kept faith with it, as far as she knew, to the end.

  Now she wondered: Was it still intact? Still gathering tales of unlikely phenomenon from across the Americas? And the more she wondered, the more the notion of seeing for herself this collection of things out-of-whack and out-of-season intrigued her. She remembered Grillo giving her a couple of numbers to call if ever she wanted to access the system and leave her own messages, but she’d lost them. The only way to find out whether the Reef was still operational was to go to Omaha and see for herself.

  She didn’t want to fly. The idea of relinquishing control of life and limb to a man in a uniform had never appealed to her; and did so now less than ever. If she was to go, it would be on two wheels, like the old days.

  She duly had her bike thoroughly overhauled, and on the sixth of October she started the journey that would take her back to the city where many years before Randolph Jaffe had sat in a dead-letter office gathering clues to the mystery that now bided its time in her cells.

  TWO

  I

  Despite her best intentions, Phoebe had failed to dream of Joe that first night lying under Maeve O’Connell’s bedroom window. Instead she’d dreamed of Morton. Of all things, Morton. And very unpleasant it proved to be. In this dream she was standing on the shore as it had looked before King Texas had overturned it, down to the birds who’d almost brought her adventures to a premature halt. And there, standing among the flock, dressed only in a vest and his Sunday best socks, was her husband.

  Seeing him she instinctively covered her breasts, determined he wasn’t going to lay his hands on them ever again, either for pleasure or punishment. As it was, he turned out to have other ideas. Producing a dirty burlap bag from behind his back, he said, “We’re going to go down together, Phoebe. You know that’s right.”

  “Down where?” she said to him.

  He pointed to the water. “There,” he said, approaching her while he reached into the bag. There were stones in it, gathered from the shore, and without another word he proceeded to thrust them into her mouth. Such was the logic of dreams that she now found her hands were glued to her breasts, and she couldn’t raise them to prevent his tormenting her. She had no choice but to swallow the stones. Though some of them were as large as his fist, down they went, one after the other; ten, twenty, thirty. She steadily felt herself growing heavier, the weight carrying her to her knees. The sea had meanwhile crept up the shore and plainly intended to drown her.

  She started to struggle, doing her choking best to plead with Morton. “I didn’t mean any harm to come to you—” she told him.

  “You didn’t care,” he said.

  “I did,” she protested, “at the beginning, I loved you. I thought we were going to be happy forever.”

  “Well, you were wrong,” he growled, and started to reach into the bag for what she knew would be the biggest stone of the lot, the stone that would tip her over and leave her struggling in the rising water.

  “Bye, bye, Feebs,” he said.

  “Damn you,” she replied. “Why can’t you ever see somebody else’s point of view?”

  “Don’t want to,” he replied.

  “You’re such a fool—”

  “Now, we get to it.”

  “Damn you! Damn you!” As she spoke she felt her innards churning, grinding the stones in her belly together. She heard them crack and splinter. So did Morton.

  “What are you doing?” he said, leaning over her, his breath like an ashtray.

  In reply she spat out a hail of fractured stones, which peppered him from head to foot. They struck him like bullets, and he stumbled back into the surf, dropping his burlap bag as he did so. The wounds were not bleeding. The shrapnel she’d spat at him had simply lodged in his body and weighed him down. In seconds the eager waters had covered him and he was gone, leaving Phoebe on the shore, spitting up stone dust.

  When she woke up the pillow was wet with saliva.

  The experience dampened her enthusiasm for dreaming things into being. Suppose she hadn’t kil
led Morton in her dream, she thought; would he have appeared on the doorstep the following day, with his burlap bag in hand? That wasn’t a very comforting notion. She would have to be careful in future.

  Her subconscious seemed to get the message. For the next little while she didn’t dream at all, or if she did she remembered nothing of it. Time went by, and she determined to settle into the O’Connell house as best she could. She was assisted in this process by the arrival of a strange, tic-ridden little woman called Jarrieffa, who introduced herself as Musnakaff’s second wife. She had been in service at the house, she explained, cleaning and cooking, and wished to be reemployed, happy to work in order to have a roof over her family’s head. Phoebe agreed gladly, and the woman duly moved in, along with her four children, the eldest an adolescent called Enko, who was—he proudly explained—a bastard, got upon his mother by not one but two sailors (now deceased). The children’s shouts and laughter quickly enlivened the house, which was big enough that Phoebe could always find a quiet spot to sit and think.

  The presence of Jarrieffa and brood not only distracted her from the pain of being without Joe, it also helped to regulate the passage of time. Until their arrival Phoebe had pretty much been driven by a mixture of need and indulgence. She’d slept whenever the whim had taken her; eaten the same way. Now, the days began to recover their shape. Though the heavens still refused to offer any diurnal regularity—darkening without warning, brightening just as arbitrarily—she quickly trained herself to ignore these signs. And the increasing good order of the house was echoed in the city streets when she went out walking. Restoration was underway everywhere. Houses were being rebuilt and the harbor cleared; ships were being repaired and relaunched. Plainly these people didn’t have Maeve’s ability to dream things into being or they wouldn’t have needed to sweat so much, but they seemed happy enough in their work. A few of her neighbors got to recognize her after a while, and would greet her with a surly look when they saw her out and about. They made no attempt to engage her in conversation, however, and her attempts to chat with them were always shortlived.