For three days she remained hostage to the Reef, like an atheist locked in the Vatican library, contemptuous, repulsed even, but going back and back to the shelves, morbidly fascinated by the dogmas she found there. Even in her most frustrated moods she could not quite shake the suspicion that somewhere amid this wilderness of insanities were gems she could profit by—knowledge of the Art, knowledge of the Iad—if only she could find them. But it became increasingly clear that she might very well have passed over them already, their form so garbled or their code so dense she’d failed to recognize them for what they were.
At last, in the middle of the afternoon of the fifth day, she told herself: If you do this much longer you’ll be as crazy as they are. Turn it off, woman. Just turn the damn thing off.
She flicked back to the file list, and was about to kill the machines when one of the names caught her eye.
The Ride Is Over, it read.
Perhaps she’d passed over these four words before, and not recognized them, but now they rang bells. The Ride Is Over had been the headline Grillo had wanted for his last report from Palomo Grove; he’d told her later she could use it for a screenplay if she wanted, as long as the movie was cheap and opportunistic. It was probably just a coincidence but she called up the file anyway, determined it would be the last.
Her heart jumped at the words that appeared on the screen.
Tesla, Grillo had written, I hope it’s you out there. But whether it is or it isn’t, I guess it doesn’t matter much now, because if you’re reading this—whoever you are—I’m dead.
It was the last thing she’d expected to find, but now that it was there in front of her, she wasn’t so surprised. He’d known he was dying, after all, and though he’d always hated farewells, even of the casual variety, he was still a journalist to the bone. Here was his final report then: intended for a readership of one.
It’s the middle of June right now, he’d written, and the last couple of weeks I’ve been feeling like shit. The doc says things are moving faster than he’s seen before. He wants me to go in for tests, but I told him I’d prefer to use the time working. He asked me on what, and of course I couldn’t tell him about the Reef so I lied and said I was writing a book.
(It’s strange. While I’m typing this I’m imagining you sitting there, Tes, reading it, hearing my voice in your head.)
She could; she could hear it loud and clear.
I tried to write once, when I first got the bad news. I’m not sure it was ever going to be a book, but I did try and put down a few memories, to see how they looked on the page. And you know what? They were clichés, all of them. What I remembered was real enough—the feel of my mother’s cheek, the smell of my dad’s cigars; summers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; a couple of Christmases in Maine with my grandmother—but there was nothing that you couldn’t find in a million autobiographies. It didn’t make the memories any less meaningful to me, but it did make the idea of writing them down redundant.
So I thought: Okay, maybe I’ll write about the things that happened in the Grove. Not just what went on at Coney Eye, but about Ellen (I think of her a lot these days) and her kid, Philip (I don’t remember if you met him or not), and Fletcher in the mall. But that plan went to shit just as quickly. I’d be writing away and some report would come in from Buttfuck, Ohio, about angels or UFOs or skunks speaking in tongues, and when I got back to what I’d been writing the words were like week-old cold cuts. They just lay there, stale and tasteless and gray.
I was so pissed with myself. Here was me, the wordsmith, writing about something that had actually happened in the real world, and I couldn’t make it sing; not the way these crazies who were putting down whatever wild shit came into their heads could do it.
Then I began to see why—
Tesla leaned forward at this juncture, as if she and Grillo were debating over a couple of glasses of vodka, and now he was getting to the crux of his argument.
“Tell me, Grillo,” she murmured to the screen, “tell me why.”
I wouldn’t let the truth go. I wanted to describe things just the way they’d happened (no, that’s not right; the way I remembered them happening), so I killed what I was doing trying to be precise, instead of letting it fly, letting it sing. Letting it be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.
What really happened in Palomo Grove doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is the stories people tell about it.
I’m thinking while I’m writing this: None of it makes much sense, it’s just fragments. Maybe you can connect it up for me, Tes.
That’s part of it, isn’t it? Connecting everything.
I know if I could just let my mother’s skin and Christmas in Maine and Ellen and Fletcher and the talking skunks and every damn thing I ever felt or saw be part of the same story and called that story me, instead of always looking for something separate from the things I’ve felt or seen, it wouldn’t matter that I was going to die soon, because I’d be part of what was going on and on. Connecting and connecting.
The way I see it now, the story doesn’t give a shit if you’re real or not, alive or not. All the story wants is to be told. And I guess in the end, that’s what I want too.
Will you do that for me, Tes?
Will you make me part of what you tell? Always?
She wiped the tears from her eyes, smiling at the screen, as though Grillo was leaning back in his chair, sipping his vodka, waiting for her to reply.
“You’ve got it, Grillo,” she said, reaching out to touch the glass. “So . . . ” she added, “what happens next?” The age-old question.
There was a breathless moment while the glass trembled beneath her fingers. Then she knew.
THREE
I
September had been a month of recuperation for Harry. He’d made a project of tidying his tiny office on Forty-fifth Street; touched base with friends he hadn’t seen all summer; even attempted to reignite a few amorous fuses around town. In this last he was completely unsuccessful: Only one of the women for whom he left messages returned his call, and only to remind him that he’d borrowed fifty bucks.
He was not unhappy then, to find a girl in her late teens at his apartment door that Tuesday night in early October. She had a ring through her left nostril, a black dress too short for her health, and a package.
“Are you Harry?” she said.
“Yep.”
“I’m Sabina. I got something for you.” The parcel was cylindrical, four feet long, and wrapped in brown paper. “You want to take it from me?” she said.
“What is it?”
“I’m going to drop it—” the girl said, and let the thing go. Harry caught it before it hit the floor. “It’s a present.”
“Who from?”
“Could I maybe get a Coke or something?” the girl said, looking past Harry into the apartment.
The word sure was barely out of Harry’s mouth and Sabina was pushing past him. What she lacked in manners she made up for in curves, he thought, watching her head on down the hall. He could live with that. “The kitchen’s on your right,” he told her, but she headed straight past it into the living room.
“Got anything stronger?” she said.
“There’s probably some beers in the fridge,” he replied, slamming the front door with his foot and following her into the living room.
“Beer gives me gas,” she said.
Harry dropped the package in the middle of the floor. “I’ve got some rum, I think.”
“Okay,” she shrugged, as though Harry had been the one to suggest it and she really wasn’t that interested.
He ducked into the kitchen to find the liquor, digging through the cupboard for an uncracked glass.
“You’re not as weird as I thought you’d be,” Sabina said to him meanwhile. “This place is nothing special.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Something more crazy, you know. I heard you get into some pretty sick stuff.”
/> “Who told you that?”
“Ted.”
“You knew Ted?”
“I more than knew him,” she said, appearing at the kitchen door. She was trying to look sultry, but her face, despite the kohl and the rouge and the blood-red lip gloss was too round and childlike to carry it off.
“When was this?” Harry asked her.
“Oh . . . three years ago. I was fourteen when I met him.”
“That sounds like Ted.”
“We never did anything I didn’t want to do,” she said, accepting the glass of rum from Harry. “He was always real nice to me, even when he was going through lousy times.”
“He was one of the good guys,” Harry said.
“We should drink to him,” Sabina replied.
“Sure.” They tapped glasses. “Here’s to Ted.”
“Wherever he is,” Sabina added. “Now, are you going to open your present?”
It was a painting. Ted’s great work, in fact, D’Amour in Wyckoff Street, taken from its frame, stripped off its support and somewhat ignominiously tied up with a piece of frayed string.
“He wanted you to have it,” Sabina explained, as Harry pulled back the sofa to unroll the painting fully. The canvas was as powerful as Harry remembered. The seething color field in which the street was painted, the impasto from which his features had been carved, and of course that detail Ted had been so proud to point out to Harry in the gallery: the foot, the heel, the snake writhing as it was trodden lifeless. “I guess maybe if somebody had offered him ten grand for it,” Sabina was saying, “he would have given you something else. But nobody bought it, so I thought I’d come and give it to you.”
“And the gallery didn’t mind?”
“They don’t know it’s gone,” Sabina said. “They put it in storage with all the other pictures they couldn’t sell. I guess they figured they’d find buyers sooner or later, but people don’t want pictures like Ted’s on their walls. They want stupid stuff.” She had come to Harry’s shoulder as she spoke. He could smell a light honey-scent off her. “If you like,” she said, “I could come back and make a new support for the canvas. Then you could hang it over your bed—” she slid him a sly look, “or wherever.”
Harry didn’t want to offend the girl. No doubt she’d done as Ted would have wished, bringing the picture here, but the notion of waking to an image of Wyckoff Street every morning wasn’t particularly comforting.
“I can see you want to think about it,” Sabina said, and leaning across to Harry laid a quick kiss beside his mouth. “I’ll stop by sometime next week, okay?” she said. “You can tell me then.” She finished her rum and handed the empty glass to Harry. “It was really nice meeting you,” she said, suddenly and sweetly formal. She was slowly retreating to the door as if waiting for a sign from Harry that she should stay.
He was tempted. But he knew he wouldn’t think much of himself in the morning if he took advantage. She was seventeen, for God’s sake. By Ted’s standards that was practically senile, of course. But there was a part of Harry that still wanted seventeen year olds to be dreaming of love, not being plied with rum and coaxed into bed by men twice their age.
She seemed to realize that nothing was going to come of this, and gave him a slightly quizzical smile. “You really aren’t the way I thought you’d be,” she remarked, faintly disappointed.
“I guess Ted didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.”
“Oh it wasn’t just Ted who told me about you,” she said.
“Who else?”
“Everyone and no one,” she replied with a lazy shrug. She was at the door now. “See you, maybe,” she said, and opening the door was away, leaving him wishing he’d kept her company a little longer.
Later, as he trailed to the john at three in the morning, he halted in front of the painting, and wondered if Mimi Lomax’s house on Wyckoff Street was still standing. The question was still with him when he woke the following morning, and as he walked to his office, and as he sorted through his outstanding paperwork. It didn’t matter either way, of course, except to the extent that the question kept coming between him and his business. He knew why: He was afraid. Though he’d seen terrors in Palomo Grove, and come face to face with the Iad itself in Everville, the specter of Wyckoff Street had never been properly exorcised. Perhaps it was time to do so now: to deal once and for all with that last corner of his psyche still haunted by the stale notion of an evil that coveted human souls.
He turned the notion over through the rest of the day, and through the day following that, knowing in his gut he would have to go sooner or later, or the subject would only gain authority over him.
On Friday morning, he got to his office to find that somebody had mailed him a mummified monkey’s head, elaborately mounted on what looked suspiciously like a length of human bone. It was not the first time he’d had such items come his way—some of them warnings, some of them talismans from well-wishers, some of them simply ill-advised gifts—but today the presence of this object, its aroma stinging his sinuses, seemed to Harry a goad, to get him on his way. What are you afraid of? the gaping thing seemed to demand. Things die, and spoil, but look, I’m laughing.
He boxed the thing up, and was about to deposit it in the trash when some superstitious nerve in him twitched. Instead he left it where it lay in the middle of his desk and, telling it he’d be back soon, he headed off to Wyckoff Street.
* * *
II
It was a cold day. Not yet New York–bitter (that was probably a month, six weeks from now), but cold enough to know that there’d be no more shirtsleeve days this side of winter. He didn’t mind. The summer months had always brought him the most trouble—this summer had been no exception—and he was relieved to feel things running down around him. So what if the trees shed, and the leaves rotted and the nights drew in? He needed the sleep.
He found that much of the neighborhood around Wyckoff Street had changed drastically since he’d last been here, and the closer he got the more he dared hope his destination would be so much rubble.
Not so. Wyckoff Street remained almost exactly as it had been ten years before, the houses as gray and grim as ever. Rock might melt in Oregon, and the sky crack like a dropped egg, but here earth was earth and sky was sky and whatever lived between was not going to be skipping anywhere soon.
He wandered along the littered sidewalk to Mimi Lomax’s house, expecting to find it in a state of dilapidation. Again, not so. Its present owner was plainly attentive. The house had a new roof, a new chimney, new eaves. The door he knocked on had been recently painted.
There was no reply at first, though he heard the murmur of voices from inside. He knocked again, and this time, after a delay of a minute or so, the door was opened a sliver and a woman in late middle-age, her face taut and sickly, stared out at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“Are you him?” she said. Her voice was frail with exhaustion. “Are you De Amour?”
“I’m D’Amour, yes.” Harry was already uneasy. He could smell the woman from where he stood; sour sweat and dirt. “How do you know who I am?” he asked her.
“She said—” the woman replied, opening the door a little wider.
“Who said?”
“She’s got my Stevie upstairs. She’s had him there for three days.” Tears were pouring down the woman’s cheeks as she spoke. She made no effort to wipe them away. “She said she wouldn’t let him go till you got here.” She stepped back from the door. “You gotta make her let him go. He’s all I got.”
Harry took a deep breath, and stepped into the house. At the far end of the hallway stood a woman in her early twenties. Long black hair, huge eyes shining in the gloom.
“This is Stevie’s sister. Loretta.”
The young woman clutched her rosary, and stared at Harry as though he was an accomplice of whatever was upstairs.
The older woman closed the front door and came to Harry’s side. “How did it know you were coming her
e?” she murmured.
“I don’t know,” Harry replied.
“It said if we tried to leave—” Loretta said, her voice barely a whisper, “it’d kill Stevie.”
“Why do you say it?”
“Because it’s not human.” She glanced up the flight, her face fearful. “It’s from Hell,” she breathed. “Can’t you smell it?”
There was certainly a foul smell. This wasn’t the fish-market stench of the Zyem Carasophia’s chamber. This was shit and fire.
Heart cavorting, Harry went to the bottom of the stairs. “You stay down here,” he told the two women, and started up the flight, stepping over the spot on the fifth stair where Father Hess’s head had been resting when he expired. There was no noise from upstairs, and none now from below. He climbed in silence, knowing the creature awaiting him was listening for every creaking stair. Rather than let it think he was attempting to approach in silence and failing, he broke the hush himself.
“Coming, ready or not,” he said.
The reply came immediately. And he knew within a syllable what thing this was.
“Harry—” said Lazy Susan. “Where have you been? No, don’t tell me. You’ve been seeing the Boss Man, haven’t you?”
While the demon talked, Harry reached the top of the stairs and crossed the landing to the door. The paint was blistered.
“You want a job, Harry?” Lazy Susan went on. “I don’t blame you. Times are about to get real bad.”
The door was already open an inch. Harry pushed it, lightly, and it swung wide. The room beyond was almost completely dark, the drapes drawn, the lamp on the floor so encrusted with caked excrement it barely glimmered. The bed itself had been stripped down to the mattress, which in turn had been burned black. On it lay a youth, dressed in a filthy T-shirt and boxer shorts, face-down.
“Stevie?” Harry said.
The boy didn’t move.
“He’s asleep right now,” said Lazy Susan’s curdled voice from the darkness beyond the bed. “He’s had a busy time.”