Sal was asleep on his stool. His huge frame was bent into the wall's corner, his arms crossed, his combat boots flat on the carpet. He was wearing overalls, and no shirt beneath them; his hair was so profuse that she could barely make out straps.

"Sal?"

His head rolled to and he opened his eyes. "Hey there, Ronnie."

She was set to complain, but stopped short. "You, uh, you busy?"

"Hungry?"

She leaned over the counter. "Famished."

"You mind eating in a bar?"

"Not if there's food behind it."

"Then we're set," said Sal, flashing a smile that shocked Veronica with its warmth. The effort of getting upright erased it, and he lumbered to the door, bent in half to pa.s.s under the threshold. "Your ride or mine?"

"Will you fit in mine?"

"Not unless you remove the front seat so I can sit in the back."

"What do you have, a van?"

"Not exactly," said Sal, smiling again and ducking under the front door. He dragged his fingers along the top of the awning, then his arm dropped heavily to his side, and he turned, left the sidewalk, strolled by the swale, then glanced back at her.

The Humvee was parked in the shadows of an ancient oak. The tree, squat but with an encompa.s.sing wingspan, did not allow sunlight to warm the ground beneath it; in its shade, gra.s.s lay thick and green while twists of weeds surrounded it like a rainforest in miniature.

"Nice, huh?" beamed Sal, his arm outstretched.

She smiled, but felt sad for some reason. Here was this man, a sideshow by both fate and profession, undoubtedly single, showing off a treasured possession. He was covered by hair, some of it golden and rich in the sun, some of it course and black, some of it graying, all of it obscene. But this steel frame, empty enough for his own, built especially for the rough terrain Florida didn't have, made him happy. He must have saved for it week by week, s.h.i.tty paycheck by s.h.i.tty paycheck. "It's beautiful," she said stiffly, as if praising a child.

"Yep, it's my baby," said Sal, producing a keyfob from his pocket. He hit a b.u.t.ton and the doors unlocked. "If you wait a second, I'll edge it out from under the tree."

"It's alright," she said, bending under the branches.

Sal got in and reached over, opening her door. He started up his prize, pulled out, said, "You're gonna love this place," ten nothing else during the rest of the drive.

Half a mile from the motel, the two-lane road curved to the left. Every hundred feet or so a dirt driveway swathed in cypress and pine snaked away from it, and she imagined these paths led to corpulent trailers surrounded by scampering Welfare kids.

The road ended after another sharp bend, opening onto a large gravel parking lot. A chicken wire fence stood between the macadam and the gravel. Beyond four old cars, a shack teetered on the crest of a hill overlooking the highway. Scrawled into the wood above the smacking screen door, the bar's moniker was apt: The Hilltop.

In the back, a shirtless man unloaded kegs from a dump truck's bowels, and when he turned to ease one of them onto a dolly, she uttered a clipped scream. Sal looked over, laughing. Protruding from the man's hair were two bony horns.

And that's when she remembered Gibsonton claim to infamy. A few years back she'd caught a show about the murder of a man called Lobster Boy, a man confined to a wheelchair with a congenital condition that fused his fingers into pincers, his legs into flippers. He was killed by a teenage neighbor commissioned by his wife, shot in the head as he sat in his underwear watching Cops.

G-Town was a stretch of trailer parks that had started out as winter quarters for circus performers, and had grown, as the years pa.s.sed, into the carny capitol of the world. Fat ladies, midgets, and sword swallowers had cleared the swampland to create a retirement village for sideshow luminaries.

"You okay?" asked Sal, parking.

"Sorry, I've never been here."

Sal shut off his baby and stepped down, his boots crunching in the gravel. He raised a hand, called out a name, and the horned man waved.

The Hilltop was an old fashioned saloon. Three wooden steps led to a porch, where Veronica all but expected batwing doors to flap on piano hinges; instead a screen door enshrouded the bar's insides in darkness. Inside, Johnny Cash bawled about a ring of fire. Ozone and an old-egg smell, like sulfur, a.s.sailed her as they closed in.

Sal held the door open. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom inside. She glanced around nervously. The rustbox jammed into the corner: a plastic-faced jukebox. Scattered: tables surrounded by rickety stools. Darkening the windows: black shades. At the bar: three people, and one behind it.

The bartender nodded merrily at Sal, shuffled from the far side of the bar. Twined around his head, a black handkerchief hid a bulbous deformity on his forehead; his eyes roamed behind sungla.s.ses; his mouth twinkled with gold. "What ya havin', Sal?"

"Two beers. This is Ronnie, folks. She's staying at my place." He said it firmly, as if to protect her from them.

Seated around an immensely fat person-Veronica thought it was a female, but couldn't be sure-three midgets waved their stubby arms in her direction. The large person wore a beer helmet; the straw flattened and curled.

The midget seated at the last stool hopped from it. His hair licked around a bald spot; thick lines wove around his face; a cigarette bobbed in his mouth when he said, "This here's Jed, the big girl's Martha, and the stout f.u.c.k there we call Stout f.u.c.k on account of his stout f.u.c.king below-the-belt surprise. And I'm Lump. I'll leave you to figure it out."

Veronica couldn't help but smile. She nodded. "Nice to meet you all," she said, feeling silly for her formality. The bartender pushed a pair of scrupulously clean beer steins to Sal, who handed her one.

Lump, still grinning, added, "Where you off to, Ronnie?"

"Sorry?"

"People don't stop in G-Town, honey. Unless they're lost. Are you lost?"

The question seemed portentous, the question of an oracle. She shook her head.

"She's not lost, boys and girls, this is a planned stop!" cried Lump, rearing back, eyeing his friends, who laughed hesitantly, unsurely. He turned back to her. "Ronnie, this is Gibtown. All year long, in every one of your cities, we lie. But here we tell the truth."

She paused, ran her eyes over them, said, "I'm leaving."

"You just came."

"No, not here. I'm leaving. Everything."

"Ah," said Lump, his finger raised, and he turned, pacing around. "Now we're getting somewhere!" He faced her. "Why?"

"I don't know," she said helplessly, and all of them exploded into laughter, their eyes meeting. She looked around-at Sal, at the bartender, who'd pulled sungla.s.ses off, revealing a pearl eye, then at Martha, who was sucking her beer down from her helmet and into her unimaginable recesses. She felt her sanity, like a transmission struggling for purchase, slip. Her eyes were wide. The beer slipped from her hand, exploded on the floor, and the freaks laughed and laughed.

Lump took her hand, led her to his stool. Martha lifted her enormous arm, pulled her close, and she was surprised by the huge woman's sweet smell.

"It's alright, darling," said Martha. "We've all got a problem or two," she finished, and everyone laughed. In a moment, everyone but Veronica had raised their drink of choice and touched it to their lips.

The people at The Hilltop that day possessed souls far more alien than their physical strangeness. They spoke not of consumerism, but of a journey. Born different, unaccepted by even their families, the carnies had traveled from the Pacific to the Atlantic by tent peg, entertaining those who would sneer at them in daylight but who traveled to see them by the light of the moon. They had journeyed through this land's soul by caravan. They loved more than they hated, drank too much, worked hard, lived disfigured, and died young. They had traveled by a kind of psychic Route 66, and had arrived at the heart of the American Dream almost by default.

Back in her room that night she paced, remembering Lump's every gesticulation, the lines on his face, his gold-tinged smile, and her memory awakened, thousands of snapshots sparking. They dizzied her with illumination, so she undid her door's chain, flipped back the lock, and walked outside.

A murmur of rolling steel rose from the distant highway. Streetlights bordered the entrance to Sal's motel; pools of yellow light merged. She held onto a column of wood. The awning distanced her from the light, made her feel invisible, and for some reason, she craved a cigarette. She felt utterly alone, inconspicuous, as if on an island.

Behind her, a door creaked open. She jumped, placed a hand over her heart. A man shuffled out. He wore a Confederate flag bandana around his head, and his beard was long and unkempt. He nodded, smiled, and she caught a whiff of putrid breath. "h.e.l.lo," she said. Beside her, he breathed deeply of the night air. "It's lovely out," she said. The man nodded, and then she saw the knife dangling from his right hand. Moonlight spangled on its blade.

2.

Robert stared at himself in the mirror. He'd lost another ten pounds. His ribs were visible; shadows, like ink, curved into them. He glanced over. Jenn was asleep on his bed. She'd joined him these last two nights; he'd been sweating through the sheets, and had awakened twice to her dowsing his forehead with a damp cloth. She was catching up on sleep now. He guessed they'd both miss another day of school.

He went downstairs to his office, rifled through his CDs, but saw nothing worthy until he came upon an old disc that he'd burned from a friend's original. He popped it in, turned up the volume, and it began softly, built slowly, a plaintive voice ringing out, and then the music exploded through. He stood alone, hands by his side, head back, eyes closed, felt the beats and rhythms time his heart, the vocals sear into him like pain, and he swayed like that, waiting for tears, a long time.

The pause was so brief he never should have noticed: after a downbeat there was a fraction of a second before the drummer continued, and within that moment Robert heard a strange sound coming from the living room, a sound he was immediately certain he shouldn't have heard at all. He shut off the music and c.o.c.ked his head: it sounded like fingernails tapping, quietly, on a windowpane. He slowly made his way toward the sound, but when he got to the living room, he saw no shadows, no branches brushing against the window. Frowning, he looked around, edging forward. He stopped, finally, cold all over, when he saw the source of the sound.

It was the vase Veronica had hand-painted some years ago, but it wasn't clicking against the window. It was moving. She'd kept the thing at the far end of a coffee table, but it had somehow traveled all the way to the edge, and it didn't look to be stopping there. The vase was twisting, moving with an almost human purpose, and was now teetering on the edge. For a moment longer Robert only stared, not believing it and knowing no one else would either. Then he broke into a run. (Although when he thought about it later in the day, he didn't realize why he'd done this: it wasn't as if he cared about the d.a.m.n thing.) It began to fall, and he nearly dove to catch it; but the thing plunged to the floor. It shattered. Larger pieces skittered along the wood, while some of it was actually reduced to a powdery ash.

Robert stood over it, staring at the mess. When the tear dropped down his face, he didn't immediately understand. But he had the strangest feeling that something was wrong. Veronica, he thought, staring at the shattered clay.

3.

In The House of Socrates, Dan awoke with a start. For a moment his eyes and mind insisted he was back in the cabin he'd lived in a very long time ago. He shook his head, sitting up now, and looked around. He'd closed the shop late, and had fallen asleep on the couch. At night the bookshelves looked like ancient monoliths, the books like doors. Perhaps both were true. He stood, circled the couch, feeling muddled and cloudy, and then something-deja vu, perhaps-pa.s.sed over him. He thought of Robert, couldn't help but think of him really, but then the thought began to shift, to change into something less thought than image; an object, a gla.s.s, no, that wasn't it, it had, when cast against the blurry light of a window, the outline of a woman, an object falling, twirling in the air, sure to shatter.

He sat back on the couch, abruptly certain he was seeing through someone else's eyes. Robert, he thought. But Robert wasn't merely staring at this falling thing; no, he was making some sort of connection. And Dan froze.

Veronica.

Chapter Twenty-One: Fire (II.).

1.

Daniel's place consisted of a single room, most of it filled with books, stacked from the floor to the ceiling. A wooden chair sat before the fireplace, and next to the outer wall a table housed more books. Sarah stood in the midst of it, looking around, and he was watching her eyes. Although she was obviously exhausted and grieving, they were like huge crystals, a dark anger brewing within them. He wasn't sure she knew it yet, but it was there.

He picked up a leather-bound volume from the table, flipped it open and said, "I knew your father, many years ago. Any woman he took must have been special." As he said this, he thought of the Greers. Fifteen years ago last week, Susan and Joseph had made there way here. Susan had done the talking while Joseph stood behind her, silent just outside the door, hands in the pockets of his worn jacket, his eyes filled with reflections of the distant plain. Daniel had found himself wondering why men did things they so obviously didn't wish to. "We've tried for so long, but nothing's ever been alive in there," Susan told him, her hands on the front of her dress, worrying it, fraying it. "Even when we'd thought there might be hope." Touched, but knowing what was coming, Daniel allowed her to ask anyway. Then he took Joseph by the arm, strolling away from his cabin and Susan, speaking in a low voice, asking him if this was what he wanted. "Will it be ours? Really ours?" asked Joseph. Daniel had only smiled, let go of Joseph's arm and made his way back. He'd led Susan inside, and shut the door on her staring husband.

Daniel had never met the boy. But sometimes, if he closed his eyes and focused he could nearly make out his face, could almost see him. Almost, but not quite. Sometimes, he thought, life is nothing but shadows.

2.

Daniel looked up, seemed to calculate something, then carefully set the volume down on the table, pointing to the open page. Sarah came forward. The picture stretched from the first to the second page. The medium was hazy, the pages ancient-she had an idea that if she blew on them the paper would come apart like a dandelion, the image lost to the dust that all was eventually lost to. The picture depicted a tribe marching through the snow. Oxen trailed before and behind them, heavy loads roped to their backs.

"Our ancestors," said Daniel. "Forced to relocate because of fear."

Sarah looked up, remembered her father telling her of the land bridge between one world and the next. A bridge that no longer existed.

"Are you talented, Sarah?"

She stared at him, unsure.

"You're not like other people. Am I correct?"

She nodded.

"I saw your father when you came to town."

"You saw him? I didn't know he saw you-"

"He didn't. I saw him, Sarah. As I saw you. He thought you were more than the rest of us. Much more."

"They were scared of me," said Sarah. Once she'd said it, for some reason she felt a great weight roll off.

Daniel nodded. "In the fifteenth century, a German named Gregory Schledt wrote that no one knew where our kind came from, or how to differentiate us from them. He believed we were G.o.d's first clay, beings He made before He created man. He was executed three days after he wrote this, accused of being a witch."

Sarah worked her mouth, but no sound came. Her father had told her that their bloodline had been thinned over the years, the tribes fractured.

"Found in The Gospel of Thomas-a book not accepted by the church, by the way-is a pa.s.sage that supposedly came from Christ's own mouth. 'I am the All, and the All came forth from me. Cleave a piece of wood and you will find me; lift up a stone and I am there.' But these exact words were written by one of us, before we became frightened of a written record, and over three thousand years ago. The author was attempting to explain our nasty habit of opening doors to other worlds, to other times, to places that exist only on nonphysical planes."

"I don't understand," she whispered.

"Time, s.p.a.ce and mortality affect our ability to see," he said, turning his back to her. "But there are planes beyond these, Sarah, and the limiting princ.i.p.als of mortality are different for us. Humans can only accept the testimony of their senses as to what reality is made of, and they have only fifty, sixty, or perhaps seventy years of possible research. But if you learn yourself, you can enable your senses to lift the veil on the purely physical world, to open doors humans don't know exist. But you must be careful. Asylums are filled with us."

3.