Kristine called late the next morning. He answered the phone in the master bedroom upstairs and sat on * the edge of the four-poster.

"Michael, I'm sorry about the night before last." She sounded tired; her tone was almost flat.

"So am I."

"Things haven't gotten any better. I'm not sure whom I can turn to."

"He hasn't hurt you any more, has he?"

"No. He's taken the car, and I don't know where he is. I've gotten this call... not from him. From an older-sounding man. He mentioned your name. And then he said terrible things were coming."

Michael looked down at his forearms. The hair was standing on end. "Did he tell you his name?"

"No. Do you know anybody who would do that?"

"I'm not sure," Michael said, his eyes closed.

"1 was going to talk up the concert before the department chairman today. Now I don't know what to do.

Michael, this man said the manuscript should be burned. He didn't have to say what manuscript. We know what he means, don't we?"

"Yes."

"He's some sort of crank, right?"

"I don't know."

"He made me angry. Everything's making me angry now."

"I think you should move out of there," Michael said.

"Oh? Move where?"

Michael didn't answer.

"Yes, well, I've been packing. Some of my girlfriends are looking around for places. Rent is just crazy these days."

"You could move in here," Michael said, and immediately regretted it.

There was silence on the other end for a long time. "It isn't that easy, and you know why."

"Yes. But it's a large house, and-"

"I'll think about it. I'm at our house now. I'll take a bus to the university this afternoon and try to do some work." She seemed to be leaving an opening.

"We should get together later, then," Michael said. "No talk about the concerto or about anything important. Just small talk."

"That would be nice," she said, sounding relieved. "Michael, what happened in the street-"

"I am sorry-"

"No, it was stupid, it was all crazy, but I wanted to thank you. It was gallant, too."

They made arrangements to meet in front of Royce Hall on the campus at five. Michael opened his eyes as he replaced the receiver on the old black phone.

The footsteps in the middle of the dusty floor. The message in the blank notebook. He could feel the presence at the very fringes of the probe he had made throughout the call. There was something foul in the air. a sensation that made his stomach twist and his muscles knot.

Michael stretched and practiced his discipline for several minutes on the bedroom's hardwood floor.

David Clarkham had not died in the conflagration that had consumed his Xanadu. He had managed to escape somehow and was now in Los Angeles, or at least on Earth, and he did not want the concerto performed.

Beneath the tension and the anxiety, there was a calm place that Michael had only become aware of subconsciously in the last few weeks. The part of Michael Perrin that waited and grew within that calm place felt curiosity as to the lengths to which Clarkham would go to prevent the performance.

The brick facade of venerable Royce Hall dwarfed Kristine, who stood alone, hands clenched in the * pockets of her brushed suede coat. Michael walked across the grass and concrete walkways toward her.

She turned toward him and smiled with a bare edge of sadness.

There was no doubt about it now. He was very much in love with Kristine Pendeers She hugged him briefly and then backed away. "I tried to call Tommy at the garage where he works. He quit the other day.

They don't know where he is"

Michael damped the emotions Tommy's name conjured.

"I'm worried about him," she said. "He just has no control."

"What about your situation? I can help you find a place to rent."

"That would be nice. I have friends looking, too. I can't afford much on the pay of a teaching assistant."

They walked to a bench and sat, Kristine crossing her booted legs and slumping against the back of the bench, leaning her head back until she faced the bright gray sky. "You know who called me, don't you?"

"His name is - probably - David Clarkham. He's very old. He helped Arno compose opus 45."

"How old is he?"

"Several centuries, at least," Michael said matter-of-factly. Kristine straightened on the bench and half-turned toward him. "I've told my mother and father, and I've told the detective, Lieutenant Harvey, about what happened when I was missing."

"I'm disappointed," Kristine said. "I would have thought you'd confess to me first." Michael couldn't tell how satirical she was being; her face was clear of guile.

"Do you believe what I said - you could be in some danger now?"

She nodded, staring at him. "Are you going to tell me?"

"Yes," he said.

"And we're still going to go ahead with the concert, if I can get it arranged?"

"Yes."

"I have a desk in an office in the music building. We can talk there. It's more private."

Michael agreed, and they crossed the campus, passing spare and modern Schoenberg Hall. Michael began the story before they reached the small office.

He had become more practiced in the telling now. He could complete the story in much less time, with fewer unnecessary details.

They ate dinner in a small pizza parlor in Westwood, then went to see a Woody Allen movie playing in one of the smaller theaters of a hexaplex. Kristine was obviously absorbing and digesting what she had been told; she didn't seem to pay much attention to the film. Michael felt her touch his arm on the rest between them, then grip it.

"You must have been terrified," she whispered.

"I was," he said.

"So you know what all the hauntings are?"

"I can guess."

"I thought you were dangerous," she said. "I was right. I'm not sure I need this kind of stuff now."

"In your situation," Michael prompted.

A middle-aged couple in the row in front of Michael and Kristine turned their heads simultaneously and delivered stern looks.

"Let's go," Kristine said. Michael vaguely regretted the fifteen dollars spent on tickets. Back on the streets of Westwood, Kristine took him through several clothing stores, pointing out dresses she would buy if she could afford them. She was still digesting the story.

"You're not crazy," she said as they left a boutique specializing in Japanese contemporary designs. "I * mean, I believe you - in a way. But can you show me something, maybe this hyloka or whatever it was?"

"I'd rather not," Michael said. "The last thing I want is for you to think that I'm a freak."

She nodded, thought some more and then said, "I don't want to go home to the house on South Bronson tonight, and I'm not ready to make love with you. But I would like to go home with you. And maybe you could show me Clarkham's house? That might give me something solid to think about."

"All right."

"And when we're at Waltiri's house, I will not think you're a freak if you show me some magic."

Michael didn't answer. They doubled back toward the lot where he had parked the Saab.

Michael lay in his small guest bed, arms crossed behind his head. The tip of his finger still ached from the trick he had performed for Kristine. Using as an example what Bin had done in the Realm, Michael had taken a boulder in the back yard, applied his glowing index finger to the rock's surface and split it cleanly in four sections. Kristine had jumped back and then quietly asked to return to the house.

She slept in the master bedroom now. Michael knew she slept without probing her aura. His awareness in many areas now seemed to come without conscious effort. He could feel the sleep-breathing of many people in the neighborhood; he seemed to hear the world turning, and the stars above were almost evident to him through the house's ceiling and the cloudy overcast. Rain fell in a thunderstorm far to the east, over the mountains; he heard its impact on the distant roofs of buildings and in the streets, on tree leaves and blades of grass.

How much of this was imagination, he could not say for sure; he thought none. Michael was simply coming in tune with his world. His inner breath seemed to follow the respiration of the molecules in the air itself, whining in their manifold collisions. He felt he knew more about how those atoms operated than he had ever been taught in school.

He knew how each particle communicated its position and nature to all other particles, first by drawing a messenger from the well of nothing and sending it out, while the receiving particle dropped the messenger back into nothing once it had served its purpose. That rather amused him; no little scraps of telegrams lying about in drifts from all the atoms in the universe.

Yes, if he had designed this world, that would be an obvious asset.

Just before he let himself slide into sleep, he thought he felt the very singing of the vacuum itself, not empty but full of incredible potential - a ground on which the world was only lightly superimposed, from atoms to galaxies; it seemed as if it might all be swept away by a strong enough will. Or more probably, as if the ground of creation could be overlaid with another scheme, imitative but different in large details.

He composed a fragment of a poem, back-tracking over the words and editing several times before coming up with: Here makes real The weaver's weft.

Lace-maker's bobbins Spin right, leap left Lift time's thread Over atom's twist, Bind such knot with Death's stone fist.

* Weave of flower And twine of light Must cross and thwart By wilt, by night.

Michael mused for a time on how realities might be put together by those less than gods. Such thinking was so abstruse and farfetched, however, that he soon drifted back to more immediate concerns.

He was not disappointed that Kristine did not share his bed this evening. He was patient in his love. She already trusted him, though skittishly; she had given him an incredible gift by believing his story.

He smiled in his slumber. He was still thinking profound thoughts and still feeling Kristine's even, steady, sleeping existence. He would have gladly remained in that state forever, but he knew how fragile his contentment was.

Now he had told everybody who counted, who had the slightest possibility of believing him. If he had been secretive, if his courage had faltered and he had kept silent, he would have been playing along with Clarkham's plans.

Michael would not be isolated.

He suspected he had just purchased some extra time, at very little cost indeed.

Yet still, on the very fringes of his outermost perception: the foulness, the spoor of the Isomage.

Clarkham had one-advantage over Michael still: a plan. Michael didn't have a clear idea of what he needed to do, or even of the nature of what was coming.

Chapter Ten.

Downstairs, somebody banged on the door frantically. Michael broke out of a dream - dangerous, dreams, since they now pulled in his circle of awareness - and lurched out of bed, grabbing a robe and slipping it over his nakedness. In the hallway, he saw Kristine standing in the door to the master bedroom.

She wore one of Golda's nightgowns, simple dark blue flannel. "Somebody wants in," she said sleepily.

Michael extended his awareness as he thumped barefooted down the stairs. The aura of the person beyond the door, a man, was very familiar and very welcome, though there was something subtly wrong...

He opened the door. A heavy-set bearded fellow in his middle forties stood outside, dressed in skins and furs like a trapper, with a cloth bag slung over his shoulder. His short gray hair jutted out in all directions.

"Nikolai!"

"Thank God," the man said with a mild Russian accent. "I have been looking all over for this place. I am not used to Los Angeles now, Michael." He lay his cloth bag down on the step and hugged Michael twice, kissing him on both cheeks.