With a sigh, he stood in the darkness, hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket, and closed his eyes.

How to get in... without noise, without drawing any attention...

No inner answers presented themselves. The mental silence of Earth prevailed; no Death's Radio, no supernatural clues, simply Michael Perrin, on his own.

He felt around the boards covering the rear doors. The pry bar would make a horrible racket pulling out these nails - would anyone notice?

"I thought you'd be back."

He tensed and immediately probed the aura of the speaker. Rotten vegetables - a supermarket full of dead produce, ancient thoughts, old dreams: the ex-owner. Michael could barely see him in the darkness; he stood inside the fence, at the south end of the footpath to the pool, little more than a gray smudge * against the bushes beyond.

"I didn't think you were a reporter. You must have known them... the two women. But what would a young kid like you have been doing with them? I figure one was a circus fat lady, the other... Who knows?"

"I'm just curious about the building," Michael said.

"It gets to you, doesn't it? So pretty. Like a pretty woman, and you're all optimistic, and you find out she's a real whore. Well, she's not a whore, but she's not what you'd expect. She was built well. She still meets earthquake standards. Work of craftsmanship and art. You want to get in?"

"Yes."

"Just look around?"

"Right."

"You seem okay. Not the kind to set fires or worse. Why don't you follow me. I..." The blur rummaged through a pocket with an arm. "... have a key. Old key. Maintenance entrance. Go back around to the lot"- he pointed east-"and jump that short wall, then crawl along the fence until you meet me here."

"You're not afraid to go in?" Michael asked.

"No. You're not afraid to go in with me, are you? I'm maybe not harmless, but I'm clean. Took the bus to my sister's in Venice, showered, cleaned my grubbies out, and not with Woolite, either." He chuckled dryly.

Michael did as he was instructed and soon faced the man on the path. There was no menace in him, only a crazy kind of hope, but hope for what, Michael couldn't tell. Old dreams. Rotten produce stacked yards deep. Dead ideas.

"Journalism used to be an interest of mine, writing, all that. My name's Hopkins. Ronald Hopkins.

Yours?"

"Michael."

"No last name, huh?"

Michael shook his head; no last name.

Hopkins held up the key, barely visible as a gleam in the dim light, and motioned for Michael to follow him around the south corner.

The maintenance entrance was a wide, heavy double door on the west side of the building, set flush against the wall. Michael hadn't even noticed it in passing. Hopkins inserted the key and opened one door, pushing it against a runnel of mud. "No power," he said. Michael held up the flashlight and switched it on.

"What do you expect to find?" Hopkins asked, his voice a low croak in the darkness.

"I don't know," Michael said. He shined the light against cinderblock walls, water and sewage pipes on the ceiling, a flight of stairs at the end of the hallway. Through an open door on the right, he saw a huge hot water tank suspended high above a trash-littered floor.

"You looking for ghosts? A psychic investigator?"

Michael shook his head. While he was grateful for Hopkins's services, he much preferred acting alone in the darkness without having to take another's safety into account. (And did he think there would be something dangerous here? More red lights?) "I should be quiet, right?" Hopkins asked. Michael turned the light on him.

"Right,"' he said. "Thanks for letting me in."

"Nothing to it. You going above the lobby level?"

"I think so," Michael said.

"I'll go that far. No farther."

"Okay." They climbed the stairs.

"Cops found the women on the eleventh floor," Hopkins said behind him. "But I still won't go above the lobby."

Michael tried the handle on the door at the top of the stairs. It was unlocked. They stepped out onto the darkened lobby. Hopkins eased the door softly shut behind them.

The air was heavy with decay. Mildew, dust, rotting carpet, stagnant puddles of water. Michael stepped over a pile of lumber and fractured sheetrock and played the light around the lobby. A long upholstered counter ran along one wall, its faded red leatherette ripped and scuffed and stained. The countertop - probably marble at one time - was gone, no doubt salvaged. The walls around the elevator and near the entrance had also been stripped, leaving mottled plaster and gaping holes for electrical connections.

Just beyond the elevator, a grand-ballroom flight of stairs led up to the second floor. The once cardinal-red carpet on the stairs was now dirty brown and black, water-stained and torn, coyly revealing concrete floor and rotten padding. Hopkins stood behind Michael, sadly surveying the ruin. "Brought it on herself,"

he murmured.

The elevator doors, half-open, showed a dark and empty shaft beyond. The polished aluminum door panels were gouged and marred and reflected Michael's light back with funhouse glee.

He sensed nothing beyond the melancholy and careless decay. There was nothing supernatural about such destruction. It was characteristically human; that which is not viable and protected is soon eroded by the passage of the desperate and irresponsible, the opportunists and the destructively curious. Humans had passed through here like water in a channel, wearing and grinding. Still, he felt a need for caution.

The Sidhe, Michael thought, would never engage in idle destruction for its own sake. However evil the Sidhe might become, they were never petty, never so unstylish as to vandalize.

"I'm going upstairs now," he said to Hopkins. "Will I need any more keys?"

"Nope," Hopkins answered.

Michael took the grand staircase, remembering Lamia at the top of her stairs, a huge bag of flesh, in Clarkham's first house in the Realm...

Which did he prefer - humanity in its idle and destructive carelessness, or the exquisite cruelty of the Sidhe, who could condemn a dancer and lover of ballet to become an obese monster?

"Be careful," Hopkins admonished.

The second-floor hallways stretched in three directions from the landing at the top of the stairs. Michael's light traveled only so far in the muddy darkness; he could not see the ends of the long hallways running east and west, but the south hall was short, with only one door on each side.

The water-stained walls were covered with markings, graffiti and scrawled names, and random gouges and scratches. A smaller stairway opposite the elevator door led from one side of the landing to the next floor. Michael climbed again; there was no sense inspecting every room.

On the fifth floor, he walked from end to end in each hall and found a broken, leaning door to one apartment on the east side. He kicked it open and grimaced at the destruction beyond. Anonymous green trash had drifted into the corners of the living room. The carpets had been shredded as if by iceskaters wearing razors for blades. Michael looked down at his feet and saw an ancient pile of feces. Nearby, yellow stains dribbled down one wall.

All of this, he thought, from the descendants of those who struggled back to humanity - or something like it - across sixty million years. The story was noble - yet as one of its end products, a human being had once defecated on this floor and urinated on this wall.

With a sudden flush of anger, Michael wondered to what extent human depravity could be blamed on the misguiding of the Sidhe acting in their capacity as gods - Tonn, who became Adonna in the Realm, portraying Baal and Yahweh, and how many other deities?

* There was a puzzle here. He knew instinctively it was useless to blame others entirely for one's own failings - or to blame the Sidhe for the failings of his own kind. But surely there was some culpability.

He had little doubt that the Sidhe had mimicked gods to restrain humans, to open a little more space for their own kind on the Earth they had abandoned thousands of millennia before.

He shook his head and backed away from the feces. Such profound thoughts from such miserable evidence.

And you, Michael? Withdrawing into cold intellectual splendor, knowing you are superior because of your knowledge, knowing you would never be so unstylish as to crap on the floor of a deserted building...

So you're superior to your own kind, more stylish; does that mean you have something of the Sidhe in you, then?

Suddenly, the crap on the floor and the piss on the wall became profoundly funny. In a way, that kind of fated animal indifference to the past had more style in it than any ordered Sidhe posturing. Michael's thoughts made a complete turnaround with dizzying alacrity.

The Crane Women, seeing the crap on the floor, would have drawn conclusions quite different from his own. They would have seen human flexibility - not just lack of dignity, but lack of restrictions.

He backed out of the apartment and returned to the stairs.

On the eighth floor, he vaguely realized what had drawn him here. There was a sensation in the air, as of a loosening or an opening. It was so faint as to be almost nonexistent, but he could feel it intermittently.

The higher he went in the Tippett Residential Hotel, the stronger the sensation became. There was nothing out of the ordinary here and now... but there had been, and there would be again. A breach in the mind-silence and the stolid yet ever-changing and infinitely detailed reality of Earth. He was feeling a tickle in an area of his mind once touched only by Death's Radio - the voice of Tonn... and the voice of Arno Waltiri. Yet the tickle came from neither of them.

It was the spoor of another place, lying nearby, separated by a much thinner wall here in the neighborhood where once The Infinity Concerto had been performed.

Michael felt a sudden exultation. His need for the bite of adventure... Here, there was hope for more adventure, more tastes of the strange and dangerous and wonderful he had experienced in the Realm. Just a shadow away, across some sheer membrane... punch a hand through and bring back mystery, wonder...

horror.

On the tenth floor, he felt an even stronger presence, quite different from that of the nearness of other worlds. He frowned, trying to analyze what the sensation was, draw it out from the back of his head and understand what it might mean.

Imprisoned music. Not The Infinity Concerto but something even stronger.

How was that possible?

The sensation suddenly confused him. He temporarily forgot who he was and why he was here. He glanced around the tenth floor landing and walked to the window overlooking the Strip. Wind brushed at him through a broken pane of glass. Somewhere in the building, a rush of air mourned for its freedom.

Not remembering was exhilarating. Suddenly he could be anybody: murderer, vagrant, good Samaritan, saint.

Michael Perrin came back to him in a gentle, nonerosive flood. And with the returning memory, he could feel through his skin, rather than hear, the music that was not The Infinity Concerto. His neck hair stood on end. It was sad, fated, vibrant yet losing energy. It was the sound of a world getting old, and of a world young and full of life, whose situation was growing old and rickety and dangerous. Put them together...

He climbed the stairs to the eleventh and last floor before the penthouse. Here there were no apartments, * but meeting rooms, game rooms, broad empty rooms only lightly littered, slightly decayed.

In one of these rooms, Michael surmised, the bodies of Lamia and Tristesse had been found. He could not tell which room. If the police had laid down paint or chalk around the bodies, it was no longer evident, at least not in the dimming beam of his flashlight.

He shook the light and felt a small anxiety at its declining batteries.

The membrane between himself and the otherness was thinning. Michael was certain that at some time in the recent past, Sidhe had been here. What they had been doing, and with what purpose, he could not tell.

Someone or something had returned through Clarkham's house, a solitary return, not likely to be repeated because the house had felt inert. The eleventh floor of the Tippett Residential Hotel did not feel inert.

Sidhe were migrating to Earth. He had seen that much in his "dreams".

Soon, a gate would open here, and many Sidhe would emigrate through this building, perhaps on this very floor.

Possibly, at the beginning, Lamia and Tristesse had tried to block passage to the hotel. The Sidhe themselves had cursed them to assume the roles of guardian and gatekeeper, but when they were no longer necessary, in fact an impediment, the sisters - Clarkham's former lovers - might have been killed and cast aside by much stronger forces.

The door to the staircase going to the penthouse had been propped open with a crumbling rubber doorstop. Michael ascended from the eleventh floor to the twelfth, leaving behind the imprisoned music.

The penthouse apartment had once been surrounded by broad, floor-to-ceiling windows, fitted with heavy drapes. The drapes were gone, leaving only their broken and despondent fittings, and the glass windows had been shattered. Their shards crunched under his shoes. Wind blew through the empty suite of rooms, whistling but not mourning, for only the skeleton of the building restrained it on this level.

On the open deck, Michael stood with his hair flicking back and forth, looking out across the hills behind the Strip. Most of the lights in the Hyatt had been turned off. He walked around the deck to the opposite side and stared across the bright lights of downtown Hollywood and Los Angeles beyond. Dawn was the faintest suggestion of a lighter midnight blue in the east. The air smelled sweet and pure after the decay in the enclosed spaces below. He breathed deeply of it and stretched his arms out, jaws gaping wide, neck bones cracking with tension.

"What a night," he said. His voice was flat and vague in the wind-sound.

Something was very definitely going to happen. Whether he was prepared or not, Michael didn't know, but he was expectant, almost eager.

"Come and get me," he said, and then felt a chill. But stay away from those I love.

Even at this hour, the city lights were a wonder and a glory. Ranks of orange streetlights marched off to the horizon. High-rise towers, far off in the clear night air, offered random glowing floors as cleaning crews finished their night's work.

People.

His kind.

Shitting on floors.

Dreaming, growing old or sleeping in cribs with developing minds dreaming feverishly of vague infant things; working late into the morning or tossing restlessly, coming up out of slumber into an awareness of the imminent day; maybe somewhere someone killing a person, an animal, an insect, someone killing himself; someone being born; someone realizing inadequacies, or preparing breakfast for the early-risers; sleeping off a drunk or making early morning love; tossing through insomnia. Mourning a loved one.

Waiting for the night to be over.

* Just sleeping.

Just sleeping.

Just sleeping.

Unaware.

Having lived all their lives in the midst of mind-silence, in the midst of stolid and infinitely detailed reality. Never knowing anything of their distant past except perhaps through vague racial memories, bubbling up as fantasy or delusion.

Hoping for magic and change; hoping desperately for escape; or simply clinging, unable to imagine something beyond. Once in, never out, except through the black hole of death.

"Jesus," he whispered on the deck above the city and the hills. His mind was racing toward a precipice.

Every little fractured emotion, every grand exaltation, all bred of Earth and nurtured by Earth and all without the compensation of what Michael had experienced, the true and undeniable awareness of another reality, another history and truth to match the grandest fantasies...

His neck-hair rose again. Some of the music he had felt through his skin one floor below had insinuated itself through the building and found him again. A high, piercing chord of horns and strings blowing and bowing without relenting, a note of intermingled doom and hope (how was that possible?) conveying an emotion unfelt for ages Michael began to shake the emotion that was the grandfather of all emotions, from which all human feelings had been struck off like shards from a flint core.

Michael heard a voice in his mind, neither Death's Radio nor Arno Waltiri, a voice he did not recognize, very old, conveying the word Preeda that was its name, the emotion that burned inside of him, threatened to burn him hollow; the only true emotion, foreign to the Sidhefor sixty million years and almost lost to humans.