Everville

  Isolation, she began to realize, could became a problem if she didn’t find some way to be accepted into the community, and she started to make a list of possible ways to ease that process. A party, held in the street outside the house, perhaps? Or an invitation to the house for a few choice neighbors to whom she could tell her story.

  While she was turning these options over she made a discovery that was to prove strangely influential. She found a cache of reading matter—books and newspapers—stuffed at the back of one of the closets. She realized as soon as she’d started to sort through the volumes that they had not been dreamed up by Maeve. More likely they’d been smuggled over into the Metacosm (or carried accidentally) by flesh-and-blood trespassers like herself. How else to explain the presence of a book of higher mathematics beside a treatise on the history of whaling beside a water-stained edition of the Decameron?

  It was this last that most appealed to her, not for the text—which she found dry—but for the black and white etchings scattered throughout it. Two of the artists—the pictures were rendered in three distinct styles—had chosen episodes of great drama to depict, but the third was only interested in sex. His style was far from slick, but he made up for that by dint of his sheer audacity. The people in his pictures were caught in the throes of sexual frenzy, and none of them shy about it. Monks sported huge erections, peasant women lay on bales of hay with their legs in the air, a couple were fucking in mud: all in bliss.

  One illustration in particular caught Phoebe’s fancy. It pictured a woman kneeling in a field with her dress hitched up so that her amply endowed lover could come into her from behind. As she studied it, a ripple of pleasure passed through her, her flesh remembering what her mind had tried so hard to forget: Joe’s hands, Joe’s lips, Joe’s body. She felt his palms against her breasts and belly; felt the pressure of his hips against her buttocks.

  “Oh God . . . ” she sighed at last, and pitched the book back into the closet, slamming the door on it.

  That wasn’t the end of the story however; not by a long way. When she retired a couple of hours later, the image and its consequences still lingered. She would not be able to sleep, she knew, unless she pleasured herself a little, so she lay there on her mattress—which was still where she’d first set it, in front of the window—and with her eyes on the undulating sky she played between her legs until sleep found her.

  She dreamed; of a man. But this time it was not Morton.

  Joe had never found the fire watchers who had believed him a manifestation of the ’shu, nor—in all his wanderings around the city—did he encounter anybody else whose eyes were acute enough to make him out. Was whatever visible presence he possessed—the shred of self the fire watchers had seen—dwindling still further? He feared so. If they were to see him now he doubted they’d be quite so worshipful.

  Several times he decided to leave Liverpool altogether—he didn’t find the sights and sounds of reconstruction comforting; they only reminded him of how removed from life he’d become—but something kept him from leaving. He tried to attach some rationale to his reluctance (he needed time to recuperate, time to plan, time to understand his condition), but none of these explanations touched the truth. Something was holding him in the city, an invisible cord around his invisible neck.

  Then, one gloomy day while he was loitering down by the harbor watching the ships, he felt something tug at him.

  At first, he dismissed the sensation as wish-fulfillment. But it came again, and again, and on the third try he dared allow himself a measure of excitement. This was the first time since the fire watchers he’d felt some interaction with the world outside his thoughts.

  He didn’t resist the summons. Up from the harbor he went, following the unspoken call.

  Phoebe dreamed she was back in Dr. Powell’s office, and Joe was out in the hallway, where she’d first seen him, painting the ceiling. It was raining hard. She could hear the deluge slapping against the window of the empty waiting room, and beating on the roof.

  “Joe?” she said.

  Her lover-to-be was perched on the top of a ladder, naked to the waist, his broad back spattered with pale green paint. Oh, but he looked so fine, with his hair cropped close to his beautiful head, and his ears jutting out, and that patch of hair at the small of his back disappearing under his belt into the crack of his ass.

  “Joe?” she said, hoping she could get him to turn around. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  As she spoke she went to the low table in the middle of the waiting room and, clearing off all the dog-eared magazines with one sweep of her arm, she lay on it facing him. For some reason the rain had started to come through the ceiling, and it fell on her in sharp, straight drops. They did more than drench her; they began to wash the clothes from her body as if her blouse and dress had been painted on, the colors running off her limbs and pooling around the table, leaving her naked, which was exactly how she wanted to be.

  “You can turn round now,” she said to him, putting her hand down between her legs. He always liked to watch her play. “Go on,” she said to him, “turn round and look at me.”

  He’d passed by this house on the hill before, and wondered who lived here. He would soon find out.

  He was moving down the path to the steps, up the steps to the door, through the door to the staircase. Somebody at the top of the flight was murmuring: He couldn’t quite hear what. He paused a moment to listen. The speaker was a woman, he could make out that much, but he couldn’t yet grasp the words, so he started to ascend.

  “Joe?”

  He had heard her; there was no doubt of that. He’d put down his paintbrush and was wiping his hands, taking his time, knowing it only made the moment when their eyes met all the more intense if it was delayed a little.

  “I’ve waited a long time for this . . . ” she told him.

  He didn’t dare believe what he was hearing. Not the words themselves, though they were wonderful: the voice that spoke them.

  Phoebe here? How was that possible? She was in Everville, the world he’d left and lost forever. Not here; not in this musty house, calling to him. That was too much to hope for.

  “Oh, Joe . . . ” the woman was sighing, and God in Heaven, it sounded like her, so very like her.

  He went to the door, knowing whoever was speaking was on the other side of it and suddenly afraid to enter, afraid to know it wasn’t her. He paused a moment, preparing himself for the pain to come, then slipped inside. The room was huge and chaotic. His gaze instantly went to the bed at the far end. It was piled high with pillows and scattered with pieces of paper, but there was nobody lying there.

  Then, from the tangle of sheets on the floor, the voice, her voice, warm with welcome.

  “Joe . . . ” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  He was looking at her. Finally, he was looking at her. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, descending the ladder and sauntering in from the hallway to the table where she lay, her body wet with rain.

  “I’m all yours,” she said.

  It was her. God in Heaven, it was her! How she came to be here didn’t matter. Nor did why. All that mattered was that here she was, his Phoebe, his glorious Phoebe, whose face he’d despaired of ever seeing again.

  Did she know he was close?

  Her eyes were shut, her pupils roving behind her lids, but he didn’t doubt she was dreaming of him. There was sweat on her face, and on her legs, which were bare. He longed for the fingers to pull away the sheet that lay between; for the lips to kiss that place and the cock to pleasure it. To make again the love they’d made those afternoons in Everville, bodies intertwined as though they’d never be separated.

  “Come closer,” she said in her sleep.

  He did so. Stood over the bottom of her bed and looked down on her. If love had weight, she’d feel it now. Or if a scent, smell it, or if a shadow, know it was cast upon her. He didn’t care how she came to realize his presence, as long as somehow s
he did; somehow understood that after the dream of him she would find his spirit waiting close by, ready for the moment when she opened her eyes and made him real.

  He was standing between her legs now, covered in paint. Flecks and splashes of it, all over his face and in his hair, on his shoulders and down over the chest. She reached up towards him.

  In dreams, and out of them, reached up . . .

  He felt her touch. Though he had no skin, he felt the contact nevertheless, where his belly had been.

  “Look at the state of you,” she said, her fingers moving up from his stomach to the muscle of his chest, brushing his invisible presence, now with her fingers, now with her thumb. And wherever she’d touched him, he saw the air begin to seethe and knit, as though—dared he even hope?—she was dreaming him back into being.

  The paint was coming off, bit by bit. She brushed a little from his cheek and from the bridge of his nose, from his left ear, and from around his eyes. Then, though the job of paint-removal was far from finished, she went back down to his belt and unbuckled it. He smiled conspiratorially, and let her unbutton and unzip his pants, which despite their bagginess could not conceal his arousal. It seemed her finger had learned the trick of the rain, because the fabric around his groin now ran off as her dress and blouse had done, fully exposing him. He put his hands on his head, and thrust his hips forward, grinning while she ran her fingers over his cock and balls.

  There were no words for this bliss, seeing his flesh knitting together as she stroked it; his balls remade unwounded, his cock as fine as she remembered it, perhaps finer.

  And then—dammit!—from somewhere in the rooms below, the sound of children shouting. Phoebe’s hand stopped moving, as though the din had reached into her dream.

  * * *

  Children? What were children doing in the doctor’s offices? Oh Lord, and here was she, stark naked. She froze, hoping they would go away, and for a few moments the hollering faded. She waited, holding her breath. Five seconds, ten seconds. Had they fled? It seemed so.

  She started to reach for Joe’s arm, to draw him down onto her and into her, but as she did so—

  They began again, pounding up the stairs, shrieking in their games. He would gladly have strangled them both at that moment and there wouldn’t have been a lover alive who’d have blamed him for it. But the damage was done. Phoebe’s hand dropped back down onto her breast. She let out a soft, irritated moan.

  Then her eyes flickered open.

  Oh, what a dream; and what a way to be woken from it. She’d have to tell Jarrieffa that in future the children—

  Something moved in front of her, silhouetted against the window. For a heartbeat she thought it was outside—some shreds of cloth or litter, rising in a gust of dusty wind—but no. It was here, in the room with her: something ragged, retreating into the shadows.

  She would have screamed, but that the thing was plainly more afraid of her than she of it. And no wonder. It was a tattered, twitching thing, wet and raw; it posed no threat.

  “Whatever the fuck you are,” she told it, “get the hell out of here!”

  She thought she heard a sound from it, but with so much noise from the kids, who were now just outside the door, she couldn’t be certain.

  She called “Stay out!” to them, but they either ignored her or missed the warning, because no sooner had she spoken than the door opened and in Jarrieffa’s youngest pair tumbled, brawling.

  “Out!” she yelled again, fearful that even if the interloper was beyond harming them it would still give them a fright. They ceased their hullabaloo, and the littler of the two, catching sight of the thing in the shadows, began to shriek.

  “It’s all right,” Phoebe said, moving to usher them out of the room. As she did so the creature emerged from the murk and headed for the open door, pausing only to look in Phoebe’s direction. It had eyes, she saw; human eyes attached by trailing threads of dark flesh to an ear and a piece of cheek, the air in which the fragments hung buzzing, as though it was some way of solidifying itself.

  Then the creature was gone, out past the panicking children into the hallway.

  Phoebe heard Jarrieffa on the stairs, demanding to know what all the noise was about, but her words were cut short, and by the time Phoebe was out onto the landing the woman was clinging to the banisters sobbing with fear, watching the creature retreating down the flight. Then, recovering herself, she began up the stairs afresh, yelling for her kids.

  “They’re okay,” Phoebe told her. “Just frightened, that’s all.” While Jarrieffa gathered the children with her arms Phoebe went to the top of the stairs and looked down after the intruder. The front door stood open. He’d already slipped away.

  “I’ll fetch Enko,” Jarrieffa said.

  “It’s all right,” Phoebe said. “He wasn’t going to—”

  The rest of the words failed her, as halfway down the flight—halfway to closing the door to lock the creature out—she realized whose gaze she had met in that instant before the creature had fled.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “Enko’ll shoot it,” Jarrieffa was saying.

  “No!” Phoebe shouted. “No—”

  She knew already what she’d done: half-dreamed him, then driven him away incomplete. It was unbearable.

  Gasping for air, she stumbled on down the stairs, and across the hallway to the front door. The sky was murky, and the light drear, but she could see that the street was empty in both directions.

  Joe had gone.

  * * *

  II

  Despite the fact that Grillo’s body had been identified, it seemed he had confounded any trail that might have led the authorities back to the Reef in the event of his demise. When Tesla got to the house in Omaha it was untouched. There was dust on every surface and mold on every perishable in the fridge, drifts of mail behind the front door, and a backyard so overgrown she could not see the fence.

  But the Reef itself was in good working order. She sat in Grillo’s stale, windowless office for a few minutes, amazed at the amount of equipment he’d managed to pile into it: six monitors, two printing machines, four fax machines, and three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, all loaded down with tapes, cassettes, and box-files of notes. In front of her the messages continued to fill up the screens as they had presumably been doing since his departure. Getting a grasp of the system, and of all the information it contained, was not going to be a simple matter. She was here for days, at least.

  She headed back out to pick up a few essentials from the local market—coffee, milk, bagels, peaches, and (though she hadn’t touched alcohol since her resurrection) vodka—then sorted out a few domestic details (the house was freezing, so she had to turn on the heating; and the contents of the fridge and the garbage can in the kitchen had to be dumped to clear the sickening smell) before settling down to familiarize herself with Grillo’s masterwork.

  She’d never been particularly adept at handling technology. It took her the best part of two days to teach herself how to operate everything, working slowly so as not to accidentally wipe some invaluable treasure from the files. She was aided in her exploration by Grillo’s handwritten notes, which were pinned, glued, and taped to both the machines and shelves. Without them, she would have despaired.

  Once she had a basic grasp of both the system and his methodology, she began to make her way through the files themselves. They numbered in the thousands. The names of some were self-evident—Dog-Star Saucers; Seraphic Visions; Death by Animal Ingestation—but Grillo had titled most of them for his own amusement, obliquely, and she had to call them up one by one in order to find out what they were about. There was a kind of poetry in some of the titling, along with Grillo’s love of puns and a playful obscurantism. The Devouring Song, Zoological Pardons, The Fiend Venus, Neither Here nor There, Amen to That; the list went on and on.

  What soon became apparent was that while Grillo had assiduously collected and collated these reports, he had not edited t
hem. There was no distinction made within each file between a minor bizarrity and something of cataclysmic scale; nor any between a lucid, measured account and a scrap of babble. Like a loving parent, unwilling to favor one child over another, Grillo had found a home for everything.

  Increasingly impatient, Tesla scrolled page after page after page, still hoping for come clue to the mystery in her cells. And while she dug, the reports kept pouring in from all directions.

  From Kentucky a woman who claimed she had been twice raped by “the Higher Ones,” whoever they were, checked in to report that her violators were now moving south-southeast towards the state, and would be visible tomorrow dusk in the form of a yellow cloud “that will look like two angels tied back to back.”

  From New Orleans a certain Dr. Tournier wanted to share his discovery that disease was caused by an inability to speak “with a true tongue,” and that he had cured over six hundred patients thought terminal by teaching them the basic vocabulary of a language he dubbed Nazque.

  From her home town of Philadelphia came a piece of psychotic prose from one who signed himself (it was surely a man) the Cockatrice, warning the world that from Wednesday next he would be in glory, and only the blind would be safe—