Mary stared. Speechless, she displayed her palm, placing it on the table. Jenn's eyes were drawn to it, but some seconds pa.s.sed before she lay her palm into Mary's. They sat like this for a long time. Presently, Mary gazed out the window, saw the glow of sun, the color of brick, over the jagged tips of pine. She squeezed Jenn's hand and let it go, ascended the living room steps and opened the door onto the sunset, breathed in the barbecue, gasoline, and the burnt smell of the neighborhood. Jenn joined her. Mimicking Mary's deep breaths, she tossed her head back and made a show of it. "I hope I have a little girl just like you," said Mary, not realizing how prophetic this statement was.

"You're having a girl?"

"I'm not sure. But I'll have a baby sometime next year."

"Wow. Neat!" cried Jenn. "Are you married?"

Mary shook her head. "No," she said, looking up.

And saw him.

The vagrant stood in the middle of the road past the yard. He was staring at them. The wind tugged his thick beard, and his coa.r.s.e, almost horse-like hair poked out from under a Confederate flag bandana. Mary could barely make out his eyes for all the hair. It was the man from the truck stop. A horrible fear pulsed through her.

But the man just lifted his nose to the sky, grunted, looked at them once more, then turned, shuffling off.

7.

Ca.s.sadaga is Central Florida's mystery. Many people never go there, never hear the town's unique history, but whenever the name is mentioned in polite circles, eyebrows raise, noses turn up, a few repudiating words are spoken, and the subject is changed. But so few actually know Ca.s.sadaga. It's as if the town's borders const.i.tute a magic circle, and for the inst.i.tutionalized religious to break through would mean a loss of faith. Many fear what Ca.s.sadaga represents: communication with the dead, Tarot readings, and cosmic possibilities.

Robert Lieber numbered with the many: he'd never been here, but had heard enough to make him feel as though he had. The town conjured many images, most of them borrowed from the B-movies that had populated his childhood: wide-eyed villagers moving through a midnight town by lantern light; women roped to stakes, shrieking their innocence; an old gypsy inspecting the Pentagram in the palm of Larry Talbot.

The drive prepared him for a ghost town: barren fields where tractors rusted in the sun, as sedentary as weary, sun-beaten beasts; farm houses nestled back from the two-lane road, shaded by naked pines and stick oaks; once-grand Southern manses now senile, their walls gaunt and ghostly.

But then he drove in. It was almost a disappointment. He peered down Stevens Street, pa.s.sed Harmony Hall, a rectangular two-story building with a gambrel roof and tiered verandas that extended across both floors, and thought of the summer he and Veronica had visited a distant aunt of hers in New England. Many of the meeting places there were constructed this simply, but it was unusual to see this late-Colonial style architecture in Florida.

He came upon the white fence Dan had mentioned. It enclosed two separate fields and bordered a dirt driveway that led to a huge cottage painted in gray and cream. A railing similar to the fence wound around an airy veranda, bracketed by four white posts. Rising above the gray eaves, a smaller second story overlooked the fields. Its gable roof hung over an odd fenestration: while the primary stories windows were wide and open, the second floor's windows were close together and boarded up.

He paused a moment, then turned into the driveway, looked through the fencing on either side, hoping to see horses, but nothing living walked there. The driveway opened on a lawn, and he glanced around to find a place to park, perhaps another car, but there wasn't a garage in sight. He pulled beside the fence, and a cough seized him. He doubled over, his eyes welled up, and when the spasm pa.s.sed, there were tears on his shirt.

On the porch, a breeze worried his clothing, and he chilled. With one arm around his torso, he pulled the screen open, knocked on the door, and stepped back. Footsteps echoed inside, then the door opened and a young woman with long dark hair leaned on the door. "h.e.l.lo, Robert," she said, pushing open the screen. He stepped inside, smiled noncommittally at her, and, when his eyes adjusted, looked around.

Ca.s.sadaga hadn't fit his myopic preconceptions, and neither did the interior of Monty's home. He'd expected furnishing in the style employed by his cousin-a Wiccan who spoke strangely, often, and fondly of Anton LaVey: faux Persian rugs, rooms separated by hanging beads, and shelves housing ceramic, gla.s.s, and wooden bongs. But Monty had left his walls bare, as he had the floors. In the center of the living room stood a couch clothed in ebony leather; a few feet away was a cherry-colored table. Only the bookshelves lining each wall gave away his interests: volumes by famous parapsychologists and demonologists.

"Why don't you have a seat?" the woman asked, pointing to the couch.

"Alright, Miss . . ."

She smiled, glanced at the ceiling. "I'll get Monty," she said, and disappeared upstairs. Minutes later, she returned. "Would you mind meeting him upstairs?"

Robert stood. "Not at all." He pa.s.sed her at the base of the stairs.

The staircase was narrow and low. On the last step, he stiffened. The second floor consisted of a single s.p.a.ce, dark but for a lamp casting light up from its place on the floor. Four metal folding chairs were arranged in a circle. A musty smell penetrated everything.

"h.e.l.lo?" Robert ventured. He heard breathing from somewhere in the room, and Robert held his hand up to his eyes, made out a shadow. "Is anyone there?"

"I'm here."

"I'm-"

"I know who you are."

"Okay," said Robert. "Would you like me to sit?"

"You can't be Sarah's child," the man.

Robert stepped back. Then he reached out, found a chair, sat. "Who are you?"

"You know my name."

"How did you know my mother?"

"She was part of us. And so are you."

Robert gaped into the darkness. Dan's wizard cast a large shadow, slumping to one side. He leaned forward, tried to make out a face, but couldn't. "What was she like?"

The other man chuckled. It was a deep, disturbing sound. "What was she like? I hadn't seen her since she was a girl." He sighed. "But still, I loved her."

Robert chose to ignore the question. "Why did she come here?"

"Why did you?"

"Dan told me to."

"A lie."

"Dan told me to."

"No, you came to Dan. You are sick, like your mother was. You had questions, and I'm something of a history buff." The voice was gaining strength, momentum.

"Did Dan know-"

"Oh, yes. He's older than I am. Good man, Daniel. He saved my life once."

"How did he know to send me to you?"

"How many stupid questions are you going to ask? Does your mind have no investigation in it?"

Robert sat back.

"I knew your mother. I know Dan. Dan knows you."

"You asked him about me."

"Ah, not a complete simpleton."

"She was an atheist, not a Spiritualist."

"Believe me, young man, you have no idea what your mother was."

Robert closed his eyes. Then he said, "How did you meet my mother?"

"We met as children."

"Were you ever-"

"No," said Monty, smiling almost wistfully. "We were only friends."

"My father told me something yesterday. About her disappearance."

"It was all over the papers for a day or two."

"And they never found her?"

"Of course not. Why did he tell you this now?"

"I'm sick."

"There are reasons for that. And you know it here"-he patted the left side of his chest- "but not"-he tapped his skull-"up here."

"All I know is that it's somehow connected to her."

"Not connected, Robert. It is her." With that, the man stood. He was larger than Robert had imagined. He shrugged his shoulders and the quilt he had been wrapped in fell to the floor. He turned, picked up a smaller blanket, wrapped it around his waist like a towel. Step by step, shadows fled his skin. His chest was mottled with gray hair; beneath sallow, sagging skin, thick bunches of muscle flickered like knots of twine. He stood before Robert a moment, gazing down with eyes still shadowed, then lowered himself onto the chair. His face appeared impossible aged, like clay left in the kiln too long. "People thought she was going mad," he said.

"What did you think?"

"For such a long time she'd dropped the veil over her eyes, and accepted the physical world as all that was real."

Robert leaned over, ran his hands over his face. "Why did she burst into a cathedral, go nuts, and leave me on a sidewalk?"

"You'll have to ask her."

"Wonderful. I'll do that." Robert stood up. "Thanks for your time."

"Sit down."

He stared at Monty, breathing heavily. "How old are you?"

"Sit down."

Robert pulled his chair back. He sat. They stared at each other.

"Close your eyes."

"Come on, if you're-"

"Close you eyes."

Slowly, Robert did as he was told.

"Listen, Robert, listen to my voice, imagine it's got skin, imagine it's a body . . . ."

8.

Some people (Monty said) call it Cla.s.sical Reality, some think of it as a veil, but this great body of energy is both paradox and reality, matter and anti-matter, question and answer. It is never-ending and finite, one thing, whole and complete, never changing but never the same. The matter is irreplaceable although it changes form, shape and dimension.

G.o.d is not separate from creation, but a part of it, one and the same, the name and the body. G.o.d is the mind of the cosmos, the self-awareness in the center of the sun. Everything, Robert, everything-earth and sky and sea-is the same. All is recycled endlessly, but it is always married, st.i.tched on an invisible seam. Men are women, women are men, and algae might be the teeth in a shark's mouth: everything depends on that indefinable definer we call time as to what a single cell is at a given moment.

Time is only useful to us because it measures lifetimes, but lifetimes do not exist. They are the lie man created when the first of his kind stopped breathing. Man believes in burial, but burial is only a planting of a different kind, and the harvest takes place after thousands or millions of our years. We are buried, and our earth once more carries the matter that used to bear our name out into her vast circulation, and sooner or later we are reborn, if only as a trillion grains of sand.

We are born of a woman, from an egg and a sperm, from a bloodline that traces its beginnings to apes, to single cell organisms, to the mist hovering over the primal land. We come from the earth, are born of it, and are weakened at birth because we've been separated from it. Our true ancestry is the soil, the water, the earth we return to when our bodies give out. Men are incomplete, a race of bared nerves severed from the root body, and these nerves possess a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and twist with it, with this life, until burning out. Until then, Man gazes up, muses on the stars, on G.o.d, on angels or demons, when he should look down at his home, at the one thing that connects all of his kind, all of his kind's thoughts, all of his kind's dreams.

Now, Robert, I want you to look down. There is a chasm at your feet. A flickering red light is somewhere in the darkness, and inside, deep inside it, is a sea of matter, of memory, of story. I want you to swim, Robert. I need you to swim.

9.

There was nothing but light. And a voice. A sense of movement, though nothing lay in any distance. Light ate inside him. He became light. Moving, roaming the infinite brightness. And then there was something. It was off in the white, a dot of black, a rip in the fabric, a tear in what had been an enveloping veil, and as he approached it wasn't a dot anymore but a hole. It began to pulse, and something glowed within it, perhaps down inside it. Something red. It grew, opened like a mouth, and he was inside. All was black and red. The red was shaded; the center was crimson while two shafts, like the stems of twin roses, were violet. Then the colors ripped as though along a seam, and in the rip he saw the world. It gaped, and he stood on nothing, looking down on a desert. It rose and fell like the line of a leg, a hip, a shoulder. A wind kicked up. The dunes cascaded around each other, whirling, rising, until nothing but sand existed.

A pyramid. It shot from the sand like the tip of a spear.

A coliseum. Cacophony plumed from its hollow insides, gathered in the air above it, paused, echoed. The cries of a city, of a time, of a race.

A brown boy sat in the sand. His garments drifted in the wind. His huge head lolled atop his shrunken, starving body. A vulture shrieked, landed in the sand above him. Its black eyes sized him. The boy leaned forward on an arm made only of bone, staring at the bird, his eyes avid yet curious, and the bird stepped forward, clucked his beak, measuring him, snapping at him, and then it was on him, scooping a chunk of flesh out, like a spoon through a pie.

He moved through it quicker now, stamping his feet on the earth, seeing jungles and steel, men and bombs, armies and galaxies. He saw All, if only a glimpse.

And stopped on a woman and boy child. They shared a bed. The boy awoke, tugged on her sleeve, and she moaned, dragged her arm along her sweating brow, opened her eyes.

It was her.