Everville

  * * *

  II

  As Raul had promised, he was waiting at Eppley Airport, though at first Harry failed to recognize him. He’d warmed up the somewhat eerie pallor of his host body with a little pancake, and was sporting a fancy pair of tinted glasses to conceal his silvery pupils. Covering his bald pate, a baseball cap. The ensemble wasn’t particularly fetching, but it allowed him to move unnoticed through the crowds.

  On the way back to Grillo’s house, with Raul tucked behind the wheel of the antiquated Ford convertible (which he confessed he had no license to drive), they exchanged accounts of their recent adventures. Harry told Raul about all that had happened in Wyckoff Street, and Raul reciprocated by telling of the journey he’d made back to the Misión de Santa Catrina, on the Baja Peninsula, where Fletcher had first discovered and synthesized the Nuncio.

  “I built a shrine up there a long time ago,” he said, “which I tended till Tesla found me. I was sure it would have disappeared. But no. It was still there. The village women still go up to the ruins to pray and ask Fletcher to intercede if their children are sick. It’s quite touching. I saw one or two women I knew, but of course they didn’t know me. There was one woman though—God knows she must be ninety if she’s a day—and I did go seek her out and tell her who I was. She’s blind now, and a little crazy, but she swore to me she’d seen him, the day before she lost her sight.”

  “You mean Fletcher?”

  “I mean Fletcher. She said he was standing on the edge of the cliff, staring up at the sun. He used to do that—”

  “And you think he’s still up there?”

  “Stranger things are true,” Raul pointed out. “We both know that.”

  “The walls are getting thinner, right?” Harry said.

  “I’d say so.”

  They drove on in silence for a while. “I thought I’d maybe make another pilgrimage,” Raul said after a minute or so, “while I’m here in Omaha.”

  “Let me guess. The Dead-letters Office.”

  “If it’s still standing,” Raul said. “It’s probably a deeply uninteresting piece of architecture, but we’d neither of us be here if it hadn’t been built.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Oh, I’m sure the Art would have found somebody to use if it hadn’t been Jaffe. But we might never have known anything about it. We could have been like them”—he nodded out through the window at Omaha’s citizenry, going about their business—“thinking what you see’s what you get.”

  “Do you ever wish it were?” Harry asked him.

  “I was born an ape, Harry,” Raul replied. “I know what it’s like to evolve.” He chuckled. “Let me tell you, it’s wonderful.”

  “And that’s what this is all about?” Harry said. “Evolving?”

  “I think so. We’re born to rise. To see more. To know more. Maybe to know everything one day.” He halted the car outside a large, gloomy house. “Which brings us back to Tesla,” he said, and led Harry up the overgrown driveway where Tesla’s bike was parked, to the front door.

  The afternoon was drawing on, and the house was even gloomier inside than out, its walls bare, its air damp.

  “Where is she?” Harry asked Raul, struggling out of his jacket.

  “Let me give you a hand.”

  “I can do it,” Harry said, impatient now. “Just take me to Tesla, will you?”

  Raul nodded, his mouth tight, and ushered Harry through to the back of the house. “We have to be careful,” he said, as they came to a closed door. “Whatever’s going on in here, I think it’s volatile.”

  With that, he opened the door. The room was packed to capacity with all the paraphernalia of Grillo’s beloved Reef, the sight of which put Harry in mind of Norma’s little sanctum, with its thirty screens busily keeping lost souls at bay. Here, he knew, the reverse process was at work. Here the lost and the crazy found refuge; a place to unburden themselves of all that obsessed them. Their reports were on the screens now, scrolling furiously. And sitting in front of them, her eyes closed, Tesla.

  “This is how she was when I got here,” Raul said. “In case you’re wondering, she’s breathing, but it’s very slow.” Harry took a step towards her, but Raul checked him. “Be careful,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “When I tried to get close to her I felt some kind of energy field.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Harry said, advancing another step. As he did so something grazed his face, oh so lightly, like the tremulous wall of a bubble. He made to retreat, but he was too slow. In one paradoxical moment the bubble seemed to suck him in and burst. The room vanished, and he flew like a bullet fired into the blaze of a scarlet sun, its color pure beyond expression. A moment there, and he was gone, out the other side and into another, this one blue; and on, into a yellow, then green, then purple. And as he traveled, sun succeeding sun, vistas began to open to left and right of him, above and below, receding from him to the limit of his sight. Forms erupted on every side, stealing their incandescence from the suns he was piercing, the blaze of which was retreating now, as the forms claimed his devotion. They came at him from every direction, bombarding him with images in such numbers his mind failed to grasp a single one. He started to panic as the assault intensified, fearing his sanity would abandon him if he didn’t find a rock in this maelstrom.

  And then, Tesla’s voice: “Harry?”

  The sound fixed a vision for an instant. He saw a scene of vivid particulars. A patch of scarred ocher ground. A hole and a bitch mutt sitting beside it, chewing at her rump. A hand with bitten fingernails emerging from the hole, tossing a shard of pottery out onto the cloth laid beside it. And Tesla—or a fragment of her—somewhere beyond the hole and the hand and the mutt.

  “Thank God,” Harry said, but he’d spoken too soon. The picture slid away, and he was off again, yelling for Tesla as he flew.

  “It’s okay,” she said, “hold on.”

  Again her voice pulled him up short. Another scene. More particulars. Dusk, this time, and distant hills. A wooden shack in a field of swaying grass, and a woman running towards him with a bawling baby in her arms. Behind her, three dark, diminutive creatures in eager pursuit, their heads huge, their eyes golden. The woman was sobbing in terror as she fled, but the child was weeping for very different reasons, its skinny arms reaching back towards the pursuers. And now, as the babe turned to beat at its mother’s head, Harry saw why. Though it appeared to be a human child, its eyes were also golden.

  “What’s happening here?” Harry said.

  “Anybody’s guess,” Tesla replied. As she spoke he saw another piece of her in the vicinity of the shack. “It’s all part of the Reef.”

  And now, as the child started to slip from its mother’s arms, the scene slid away like the first, and on he flew, his mind starting to snatch hold of some of the dramas he was piercing. Never more than a piece—a flock of birds in ice, a coin bleeding on the ground, somebody laughing in a burning chair—but enough to know that every one of these innumerable images was part of some greater scheme.

  “Amazing—” he breathed.

  “Isn’t it?” Tesla said, and again her voice brought him to a halt. A city, this time. A lowery sky, and from it flecks of silvery light dropping lightly, like mirrored feathers. On the sidewalks below, people went about their business blind to the sight, except for one upturned face: an old man, pointing and hollering.

  “What am I seeing?” Harry said.

  “Stories . . . ” Tesla replied, and hearing her, Harry glimpsed another piece of her mosaic, in the crowd. “That’s what Grillo gathered here. Hundreds of thousands of stories.”

  The street was slipping. “I’m losing you—” Harry warned.

  “Just let go,” Tesla replied. “I’ll catch up with you somewhere else.”

  He did as she instructed. The street fled, and he moved on at breath-snatching speed while the stories continued to fly at him from all directions. Again, he caught only glim
pses. But now he had some way to interpret the sights, however brief. There were epics and chamber pieces here; domestic dramas and quests to the end of the world; Old Testament splendors and nursery-tale terrors.

  “I’m not sure I can take much more,” Harry said. “I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “You’ll find another,” Tesla quipped, and again he stopped dead in the midst of a tale.

  This time, however, there was something different about it. This was a story he knew.

  “Recognize it?” Tesla said.

  Of course. It was Everville. The crossroads, Saturday afternoon, with the sun pouring down on a scene of farce and lunacy. The band on their butts; Buddenbaum digging for glory; the air laced with visions of whores. It was not the way Harry remembered it exactly, but what the hell? It held its own with anything he’d witnessed so far.

  “Am I here?” he asked.

  “You are now,” Tesla replied.

  “What?”

  “Grillo was wrong, calling it a reef,” Tesla went on. “A reef’s dead. This is still growing. Stories don’t die, Harry—”

  “They change?”

  “Exactly. Your seeing all this enriches it, evolves it. Nothing’s ever lost. That’s what I’m learning.”

  “Are you going to stay?” Harry said, watching the drama at the crossroads continue to elaborate.

  “For a while,” she said. “There are answers here, if I can get down to the root.”

  She reached out towards Harry as she spoke, and he saw that the fragments he’d glimpsed on the way here were before him still. Part of her was carved from a patch of ocher ground, and part from the hole dug there. Part resembled the shack in the field, and part the golden-eyed child. Part was made of mirror-flakes, part was the old man, pointing skyward.

  And part, of course, was made from that sunlit afternoon, and from Owen Buddenbaum, who would be at the crossroads raging for as long as stories were told.

  Finally, though he could not see this sliver, he knew she was also made from him, who was in this story somewhere.

  I am you . . . the Nomad murmured in his head.

  “Do you understand any of this?” Tesla asked him.

  “I’m beginning to.”

  “It’s like love, Harry. No; that’s not right. I think maybe it is love.”

  She smiled at her own comprehension. And as she smiled the contact between them was broken. He flew from her, back through the blazing colors, and was returned in the bursting of a bubble to the stale room he’d departed.

  Raul was there, waiting for him, trembling.

  “God, D’Amour,” he said, “I thought I’d lost you.”

  Harry shook his head. “It was touch and go for a moment there,” he said. “I was visiting with Tesla. She was showing me around.”

  He looked at the body sitting in the chair in front of the monitors. It seemed suddenly redundant: the flesh, the bone. The true Tesla—perhaps the true Harry, perhaps the true world—was back where he’d come from, telling itself in the infinite branches of the story tree.

  “Will she be coming back?” Raul wanted to know.

  “When she’s got where she wants to go,” Harry replied.

  “And where’s that?”

  “Back to the beginning,” Harry said. “Where else?”

  * * *

  III

  That first trip down to the harbor proved fruitless; Phoebe found nobody who knew anything about the misamee. But on the second day her relentless questioning bore fruit. Yes, one of the Dock Road bar owners told her, he knew what she was talking about. Some creature in an agonized and unfinished state had indeed been seen down here several weeks before. In fact, if his memory served, some attempt had been made to corral the abomination, for fear it had murderous appetites. To his knowledge the creature had never been caught. Perhaps, he suggested, it had been driven back into the sea, from which everybody had assumed it emerged. In which case the tide had carried its misbegotten body away.

  There was both good news here and bad. She had confirmation that she was at least searching in the right quarter of the city; that was the good. But the fact that Joe had not been sighted of late suggested that perhaps the bar owner’s theory was correct, and he had indeed been lost to the waters. She now went in search of somebody who had been a member of the pursuit party, but as the days went by it became more and more difficult to keep track of her progress. There were new ships docking daily, from single masted vessels to the plethora of fishing boats that plied in and out of the harbor, leaving light and returning heavy with their catch. Often she found herself neglecting her inquiries and listening, half enchanted, to the talk exchanged by the sailors and the stevedores: stories of what lay out beyond the tranquil waters of the harbor, out in the wilds and wastes of the dream-sea.

  She had heard of the Ephemeris of course, and from Musnakaff of Plethoziac and Trophetté. But there were far more than these; countries and cities whose names conjured glories. Some were real places (their goods being unloaded at the dock), others in the category of fables. Into the former group went the island of Berger’s Mantle, where crews were apparently lost all the time, preyed upon by a species so exquisite the victims died of disbelief. Into the latter went the city of Nilpallium, which had been founded by a fool, and which was ruled over—justly and well, so legend went—by its founder’s dogs, who had devoured him upon his decease.

  The story that most engaged her, however, was that of Kicaranka Rojandi. It was reputedly a tower of burning rock, which rose straight-sided out of the sea, climbing to a height of half a mile. The species that crawled and climbed upon it were not consumed by its flames, but had to constantly fling themselves down into the steaming waves to cool their bodies, only to begin the ascent afresh when they could bear to, desperate to court and fertilize their queen, who lived encased in flame at the very summit.

  The more preposterous of these stories were a healthy, indeed vital, distraction from her misery, and the true ones were curiously encouraging, evidence as they were of how many miraculous states of being were plausible here. If the citizens of b’Kether Sabbat had the courage to live in an inverted pyramid, and the fire climbers of Kicaranka Rojandi the devotion to climb their tower, believing they would one day reach their queen, should she not keep looking for her misamee?

  And then came the day of the storm. It had been predicted by the retired mariners along the quayside for some time: a tempest of notable ferocity that would have all manner of deep-sea fish rising in shoals from their trenches. For those enterprising fisherman willing to risk their nets, their boats, and very possibly their lives in open waters, a haul of prodigious proportions was predicted.

  Phoebe was warming herself in front of the kitchen fire when the winds started to rise, the children sitting eating stew nearby, their mother kneading bread.

  “I hear a window slamming,” Jarrieffa said, as the first rain pattered on the kitchen sill, and hurried away to close it.

  Phoebe stared into the flames, while the gusts whooped and howled in the chimney. It would be quite a spectacle down by the Dock Road, she suspected. Ships tossing at anchor and the sea throwing itself against the harbor wall. Who knew what a storm like this would drive up onto the shore?

  She rose as she formed the thought. Who knew indeed?

  “Jarrieffa?” she yelled, as she fetched her coat from the closet. “Jarrieffa! I’m going out!”

  The woman was coming down the stairs now, a look of concern on her face. “In this weather?” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “Take Enko with you. It’s cruel out there.”

  “No, Jarrieffa, I can stand a little rain. You just stay in the warm and bake your bread.”

  Still protesting that this was not a wise thing to be doing, Jarrieffa followed Phoebe to the door, and out onto the step.

  “Go back inside,” Phoebe told her. “I’ll be back in a while.”

  Then she was off, i
nto the deluge.

  It had cleared the streets as effectively as the Iad. She encountered scarcely a soul as she made her way down through the warren of minor streets and back alleys that were by now as familiar to her feet as Main Street and Poppy Lane. The closer she got to the water, the less cover she had to shield her from the fury of the storm. By the time she reached the Dock Road she was leaning into the wind, and more than once had to grip a wall or railing to keep herself from being thrown off her feet.

  The quayside and the decks of the ships were a good deal busier than the streets she’d come through, as crews labored to secure sails and lash down cargo. One of the single-masted vessels had slipped its mooring and as Phoebe watched it was dashed against the harbor wall. Its timbers splintered, and a number of its crew jumped into the water, which was frenzied. She didn’t wait to see if the vessel sank, but hurried on, past the harbor and through the warehouse district adjacent to it, out onto the shore.

  The waves were tall and thunderous, the air so thick with spray and rain she could not see more than a dozen yards ahead of her. But the grim fury of the scene suited her mood. She stumbled over the dark, slick rocks, daring the waters to reach high enough to claim her, yelling Joe’s name as she went. The gale snatched the syllable from her lips, of course, but she strode on doggedly, her tears mingling with the rain and the spume off the dream-sea.

  At last her fatigue and her despair overcame her. She sank down onto the stones, soaked to the skin, her throat too hoarse and lungs too raw to call his name again.

  Her extremities were numb with cold, her head throbbing. She raised her hands to her mouth to warm her fingers with her breath, and was thinking that if she didn’t move soon she might very well freeze to death when she caught sight of a figure in the mist further along the beach. Somebody was approaching her. A man, his few clothes less than rags, his body a strange compendium of forms and hues. In places he was purplish in color, his skin scaly. In others he had small patches of almost silvery skin. But the core of him—the flesh around his eyes and his mouth, down his neck and across his chest and belly—was black. She started to rise, the name she had been yelling to the wind too much for her astonished lips.