She couldn't quite discipline the shudder that ran through her at the touch and the thought.

"Don't like it?" he said, suddenly suspicious. His eyes flickered off to his left as he understood the conspiracy. There was a glint of fear in them. He started to turn. Jaffe was two yards from him, and closing, the knife raised above his head, the glint on its blade an echo of the glint in Kissoon's eyes. Two lights that belonged together.

"Don't-" Kissoon began, but the knife dared to descend before he could forbid it, sliding into his wide right eye. Kissoon didn't scream this time, but expelled his breath as a long moan. Jaffe pulled the knife out and stabbed again, the second stab as accurate as the first, puncturing the left eye. He drove the blade in to the hilt, and pulled it out. Kissoon flailed, his moan becoming sobs as he fell to his knees. With both his fists wrapped around the knife Jaffe delivered a third blow to the top of the shaman's skull, then went on stabbing, the force of the blows opening wound after wound.

Kissoon's sobs stopped as suddenly as they'd begun. His hands, which had been scrabbling at his head to ward off further cuts, fell to his sides. His body stayed upright for two beats. Then he fell forward.

A spasm of pleasure ran through Tesla that was indistinguishable from the highest pleasure. She wanted the bomb to detonate at that moment, matching its completion with her own. Kissoon was dead and it would not be bad to die now, knowing the Iad would be swept away in the same moment.

"Go on, "she said to the bomb, trying to sustain the bliss she felt until the flesh was burned off her bones. "Go on, will you? Go on."

But there was no explosion. She felt the rush of pleasure start to drain from her, and the realization appear in its place that she'd missed some vital element in all of this. Surely with Kissoon dead the event he'd sweated all those years to hold at bay had to come? Now; on delay. But there was nothing. The steel tower still stood.

"What have I missed?" she asked herself. "What in G.o.d's name have I missed?"

She looked towards Jaffe, who was still staring down at Kissoon's corpse.

"Synchronicity," he said.

"What?"

"I killed him."

"It doesn't seem to have answered the problem."

"What problem?"

"This is Point Zero. There's a bomb, just waiting to detonate. He was holding that moment at bay."

"Who was?"

"Kissoon! Isn't it obvious?"

No, babe-she told herself-it's not. Of course it's not. The thought was suddenly clear in her head that Kissoon had left the Loop in Raul's body intending to come back to claim his own. Once out in the Cosm he hadn't been able to hold the moment. Somebody else must have done it for him. That somebody, or rather, that some-spirit, was still doing it.

"Where are you going?" Jaffe wanted to know as she started in the direction of the wastes beyond the tower. Could she even find the hut? He followed after her, still asking questions.

"How did you get us here?"

"Ate it up and spat it out."

"Like my hands?"

"No, not like your hands. Not at all."

The sun was steadily being blocked out by the mesh of clots, the light only breaking through in patches.

"Where are you going?" he said again.

"The hut. Kissoon's hut."

"Why?"

"Just come with me. I need help."

A cry in the gloom slowed progress a moment.

"Poppa?"

She looked round to see Tommy-Ray stepping out of shadow into a patch of light. The sun was strangely kind to him, its brilliance bleaching out the worst details of his transformed state.

"Poppa?"

Jaffe stopped following Tesla.

"Come on," she urged him, but she already knew she'd once more lost him to Tommy-Ray. The first time it had been to his thoughts. This time it was to his presence.

The Death-Boy started to stumble towards his father.

"Help me, Poppa," he said.

The man opened his arms, saying nothing, nor needing to. Tommy-Ray fell into them, clutching at Jaffe in return.

Tesla offered him one last chance to a.s.sist her.

"Are you coming or not?"

The answer was simple: "Not," he said.

She didn't bother to waste breath on the issue. The boy had a prior claim; a primal claim. She watched their embrace tighten, as though they were squeezing the breath from each other, then she again set her sights on the tower and began to run.

Though she forbade herself a backward glance, as she came to the tower-her lungs already aching, and still a bruising distance to go before she found the hut-she looked. Father and son had not moved. They stood in a patch of brightness, wrapped around each other, with the clots still a.s.sembling behind them. From this distance their construction resembled the work of a monumental and funereal lace-maker. She studied the curtain a moment, her mind racing through interpretations and finding a solution to its existence both preposterous and plausible: that this was a veil behind which the Iad Uroboros were going to rise. Indeed there seemed to be motion behind its folds already; a greater darkness, a.s.sembling.

She took her gaze from the sight, glanced up briefly at the tower and its lethal load, then started off again in the direction of the hut.

The trip in the opposite direction, through the town towards the perimeter of the Loop, was no easier than Tesla's. They'd all been on too many journeys: into the earth, into the sea, to islands, caves and to the limits of their sanity. This last trip demanded energies they scarcely had to give. With every other step their bodies threatened to give out, the hard desert floor looking comfortable by contrast with the agony of advancing. But the oldest fear known to man drove them on: that of the pursuing beast. It had neither claws nor fangs, of course, but it was all the more lethal for that. A beast of fire. It was only when they reached the town that they slowed their pace long enough to exchange a few gasping words.

"How much farther?" Jo-Beth wanted to know.

"Just on the other side of the town."

Howie was staring back at the Iad curtain, which had now mounted a hundred feet and more.

"Do you think they see us?" he said.

"Who?" said Grillo. "The Iad? If they do they don't seem to be following."

"That isn't them," Jo-Beth said. "That's just their veil."

"So we've still got a chance," Howie said.

"Let's take it," said Grillo, and set the pace down the Main Street. It wasn't chance. Tesla's mind, befuddled as it was, had the route across the desert to the hut inscribed deep into it. As she trotted (running was beyond her) it was the conversation she'd had with Grillo back at the motel that she went over in her mind, the exchange in which she'd confessed to him the extent of her spiritual ambition. If she died here in the Loop-and that was virtually inevitable-she knew she'd come to understand more about the workings of the world in the days since she'd arrived in Palomo Grove than in all the years previous. She'd had adventures beyond her body. She'd encountered incarnations of good and evil, and learned something of her condition because she resembled neither. If she was gone from this life soon, either at the instant of detonation, or at the Iad's arrival, she had no complaint at that.

But there were so many souls who had not yet made their peace with extinction, nor should have to. Infants, children, lovers. Peaceable people the planet over, whose lives were still in the making and enriching, who, if she failed now, would wake up tomorrow with any chance to taste the same adventures in spirit she'd had denied them. Slaves of the Iad. What justice was there in that? Before coming to the Grove she'd have given the twentieth century's answer to that question. There was no justice because justice was a human construct and had no place in a system of matter. But mind was in matter, always. That was the revelation of Quiddity. The sea was the crossroads, and from it all possibilities sprang. Before everything, Quiddity. Before life, the dream of life. Before the thing solid, the solid thing dreamt. And mind, dreaming or awake, knew justice, which was therefore as natural as matter, its absence in any exchange deserving of more than a fatalistic shrug. It merited a howl of outrage; and a pa.s.sionate pursuit of why. If she wished to live beyond the impending holocaust it was to shout that shout. To find out what crime her species had committed against the universal mind that it should now be tottering on execution. That was worth living to know-The hut was in sight. Behind her the suspicion she'd had that the Iad were rising behind the veil of clots, was confirmed. The giants of her childhood nightmares were emerging from the schism, and would soon draw that veil away. When they did they'd surely see her, and come in a few thunderous strides to stamp her out. But they didn't hurry. Their vast limbs took time to draw up from Quiddity; their heads (the size of houses, every window blazing) were immense, and needed the full machinery of their anatomies before they could be raised. When she began again towards the hut the glimpse she'd had of the emergents began to resolve itself in her mind's eye, her wits making coherence of their t.i.tanic mystery.

The door of the hut was closed, of course. But it wasn't locked. She pulled it open.

Kissoon was waiting for her. The shock of the sight of him took her breath away, and she was about to retreat out into the sun until she realized that the body propped up against the far wall was vacated by spirit, its system ticking on to preserve it from mortification. There was n.o.body behind the glazed eyes. The door slammed closed, and without wasting any more time she named the only spirit here that could possibly be holding the moment in Kissoon's stead.

"Raul?"

The weary air in the hut whined with his unseen presence.

"Raul? For G.o.d's sake, I know you're here. I know you're afraid. But if you can hear me, show me somehow, will you?"

The whine intensified. She had the sense that he was circling the hut, like a fly trapped in a jar.

"Raul, you've got to let go. Trust me and let go. "

The whine was beginning to hurt her.

"I don't know what he did to you to make you give up your body, but I know it wasn't your fault. He tricked you. He lied to you. He did the same to me. Do you understand? You're not to blame."

The air began to settle somewhat. She took a deep breath and began her persuasions again, remembering how she'd first bullied him into coming with her, back at the Mission.

"If it's anybody's fault, it's mine," she said. "Forgive me, Raul. We've both of us come to the end. But if it's any comfort, so's Kissoon. He's dead. He won't be coming back. Your body...won't be coming back. It's destroyed. There was no other way of killing him."

The hurt of the whine had been replaced by another, deeper ache: that of knowing how much his spirit must be suffering, dislocated and frightened, unable to let go of the moment. Kissoon's victim, as they'd both been. In some ways, so much alike. Nunciates both, learning to climb out of their limitations. Strange bedfellows, but bedfellows nevertheless. Which thought inspired another.

She spoke it.

"Can two minds occupy the same body?" she said. "If you're afraid...come into me. "

She let that notion hang in the silence, not pressing him for fear his panic would escalate. She waited beside the cold ashes of the fire, knowing every second he remained unper-suaded gave the Iad another foothold, but devoid of further arguments or invitations. She'd offered him more than she'd offered anyone in her life: total possession of her body. If he didn't accept she had no more persuasions.

After a few, breathless seconds something seemed to brush the nape of her neck, like lover's fingers, the stroke suddenly becoming a needle point.

"Is this you?" she said.

In the beat it took her to ask the question it became self-directed, as his spirit entered her head.

There was no dialogue, nor any need for dialogue. They were twin ghosts in the same machine, and in the instant of his entering entirely conversant with each other. She read from his memories the method by which Kissoon had claimed him, pulling him through to the Loop from the bathroom in North Huntley Drive, using his confusion to subdue him He'd been easy meat. Weighed down by leaden smoke, mesmerized into performing one duty and one alone, the holding of the moment, then wrenched from his body to do that duty in a blind round of terror that had not ceased until she'd opened the door. She had no more need to instruct him in their next act they had to perform together than he'd had to tell her his story. He shared her comprehension.

She went back to the door, and opened it.

The Iad's curtain was huge enough now that its shadow touched the hut. There were still some shafts of sun breaking through, but none near the threshold upon which Tesla stood. Here there was darkness. She looked towards the veil, seeing the Iad a.s.sembled behind it. Their silhouettes were the size of thunderheads, their limbs like whips plaited to beat mountains with.

Now, she thought. Or never. Let the moment go.

Let-it-go.

She felt Raul do just that, his will releasing its hold and shedding the burden Kissoon had laid upon him. A wave seemed to move from them towards the tower above which the Iad loomed. After years of suspension, time was unfettered. Five-thirty on the sixteenth of July was moments away, and so was the event that marked that innocent instant as the beginning of Mankind's Last Madness.

Her thoughts went to Grillo, and to Jo-Beth and Howie, urging them on through the exit and into the safety of the Cosm, but her urgings were interrupted as a brightness began in the heart of the shadow. She couldn't see the tower, but she saw the shock spring from the platform, the ball of fire becoming visible and a second flash appearing the instant after, the brightest light she'd ever seen, from yellow to white in a blink- We can do no more, she thought, as the fire began to swell obscenely. I could be home.

She pictured herself-woman, man and ape in one bruised body-standing on the step of the hut, the light of the bomb blazing on her face. Then she imagined that same face and body in another place. She had only seconds to work with. But thought was fast.

Across the desert she saw the hosts of the Iad drawing their veil of clots aside, as the blazing cloud grew to eclipse them. Their faces were like flowers the scale of mountains, and they kept opening, throat upon throat upon throat. It was an awesome display, their hugeness seeming to conceal labyrinths, which turned inside out as they uncovered themselves. Tunnels becoming towers of flesh, if it was flesh they had, and turning again, and turning, so that every part of them was in constant transformation. If singularity was indeed their appet.i.te, then it was as salvation from this prodigious flux.

Mountains and fleas, Jaffe had said, and she saw now what he'd meant by that. The Iad was either a nation of leviathans, itching with numberless parasites and opening their guts, over and over, in the vain hope of shedding them, or the parasites themselves, so numerous they imitated mountains. She would not know which, this side of life, or Trinity. Before she could interpret the countless forms they took, the explosion eclipsed them, burning their mystery out.

At the same moment Kissoon's Loop-its task fulfilled in a fashion its creator could never have antic.i.p.ated-disappeared. If the device on the tower failed to consume them utterly they were undone nevertheless, their madness and their appet.i.te sealed up in a moment of lost time.

VIII.

As Howie, Jo-Beth and Grillo had entered the confounding terrain at the perimeter of the Loop, the tiny time to either side of 5:30 a.m., July 16th 1945, which Kissoon had created, commandeered and been captive of, a light had bloomed behind them. No, not bloomed. Mushrooms had no flowers. None of them looked back, but pushed their exhausted bodies to one last, superhuman effort, which carried them, the fire at their backs, into the safety of real time. They'd lain on the desert floor, unable to move, for a long while, only dragging themselves to their feet when the risk of being frica.s.seed where they lay became impossible to discount.

It was a long and difficult haul back to California. They found a highway after an hour of wandering, and after another hour a deserted garage along that highway. There Grillo left the lovers, knowing that hitching a ride with such freaks in tow would be impossible. He found a ride himself, after some considerable time, and in a small town bought a beaten-up truck with the entire contents of his wallet, including his credit cards, then headed back to the garage to pick Jo-Beth and Howie up and drive them back to Ventura County. They lay in the back of the truck in a deep sleep, their exhaustion so utter nothing woke them. They arrived back at the Grove just before dawn of the following day, but there was no possibility of access. The same authorities who'd been so slow, negligent, or-as was Grillo's suspicion-complicit in not defending the Grove against the forces erupting in its midst had now, with the eclipse of those forces, become obsessively cautious. The town was sealed off. Grillo didn't challenge the edict. He simply turned around before he came to the barricades, and headed along the highway until he found a place to park the truck and sleep. Their slumbers weren't interrupted. Some hours later, when he woke, he found the back seat empty. His every joint aching he got out, took a p.i.s.s, then went to look for the lovers. He found them up an incline, sitting in the sun. The transformations that Quiddity had worked upon them both were already in retreat. Their hands were no longer fused, the bizarre forms that had remade their faces had burned away in the sunlight, until they were no more than marks on once flawless skin. With time they too would probably disappear. What he doubted would ever fade was the look in their eyes when they met his gaze: the stare of two people who had shared an experience n.o.body else in the world had shared, and had become, in that sharing, possessed by each other. More than a minute spent in their presence and he felt like an intruder. The three of them talked briefly of what was wisest to do now, and concluded that staying in the vicinity of the Grove was best. They made no mention of events in the Loop, or in Quiddity, though Grillo burned to ask what it had been like to float in the dream-sea. With rough plans laid, Grillo went back to the truck and waited for them to come down. They came after a few minutes, hand in hand.

There had been no paucity of witnesses to Tesla's relocation of a part of Coney Eye. Observers and photographers both parked on the Hill and hovering above it saw the facade grow smoky, become transparent and finally vanish entirely. With a portion of its structure summarily removed the entire house succ.u.mbed to gravity. Had there been only two or three witnesses, doubts might have been cast on the veracity of these accounts. It was only in the pages of the National Enquirer and its fanciful ilk that solid wood and slate were whisked off into another plane of being. But there were twenty-two spectators in all. They each had their vocabularies to describe what they'd seen-some stark, some flowery-but the root facts remained a constant. A substantial part of Buddy Vance's museum to the true Art of America had been s.n.a.t.c.hed into a different reality.

Some of the witnesses (those weariest among the number) even claimed to have caught a glimpse of that place. A white horizon and a bright sky; dust blowing around. Nevada, maybe; or Utah. Any one of a thousand wide open places. America had no shortage of those. The country was huge, and still full of emptiness. Places where a house could reappear and never be found; where mysteries could be happening every day of the week and n.o.body be any the wiser for it. For a few of the witnesses, seeing what they'd seen, it was the first time it had ever occurred to them that maybe a country could be too big, too full of open s.p.a.ce. But it occurred now, and it haunted them.

One of those s.p.a.ces, at least for the foreseeable future, would be the ground upon which Palomo Grove had been built.

The steady process of its destruction didn't end with Coney Eye's relocation into the Loop. Far from it. The earth had been waiting for a sign, and had got it. Cracks widened to fissures and fissures became chasms, overturning entire streets. The most affected of the villages were Windbluff and Deerdell, the latter virtually flattened by shock-waves from the vicinity of the wood, which disappeared in its entirety, leaving churned, smoking earth in its place. The Hill and its sumptuous properties were dealt as severe a blow; or several blows. It was not the houses immediately below the place where Coney Eye had stood that took the brunt of the destruction (though it would scarcely have mattered-their owners had been among the first to leave, vowing they'd not return). It was the Crescents. Emerson moved south two hundred yards, its houses concertinaed in the process. Whitman went west, the houses, by some quirk of geology, pushed and tipped into their own pools. The other three Crescents were simply laid flat, much of the debris finding its way down the Hill and damaging countless houses in its descent. AH of which was academic. n.o.body would be salvaging anything from their houses; the entire area was deemed unstable for six days, during which time fires raged unattended, destroying a large part of the property which the ground had not overturned or swallowed. In this regard the unluckiest village was Stillbrook, the sometime occupants of which might have eventually claimed some of their personal belongings from their houses had a fire not flared in a house on Fellowship Street on a night when the kind of wind that had once brought Grovers out into their yards to smell the ocean been blowing, the gusts driving the flames through the village with devastating speed. By morning half the village was ashes. By the evening of the same day, the other half.

It was that night, the night after Stillbrook burned, and six days after events on the Hill, that Grillo came back to the Grove. He had slept more than half of the intervening time, but he didn't feel that much better for the rest. Sleep was not the palliative it had been. He wasn't eased by it, soothed and comforted by it. When he closed his eyes his head played out scene after scene from the past. Mostl of the show was recent. Ellen Nguyen featured strongly, asking him over and over again to give up kisses and use his teeth; so did her son, sitting in bed surrounded by Balloon Men. There were guest appearances by Roch.e.l.le Vance, who did and said nothing. but offered her beauty to the parade: there'was Good Man Fletcher, down at the Mall. There was the Jaff in the upper room at Coney Eye, sweating out power. And Witt alive. And Witt dead, face down in the water.

But starring in the story was Tesla, who'd played out her last trick on him, smiling and not saying goodbye even though she knew it was. They'd not been lovers; not even close. In a sense he'd never quite understood what he felt for her. Love certainly, but of a kind difficult to express; perhaps impossible. Which made mourning her equally problematic.

It was that sense of unfinished business between Tesla and himself which kept him from returning any of the calls Abernethy left on his answering machine back home, though G.o.d knows the story itched in him, and itched, and itched. She'd always expressed ambiguity about his making the truth public, even though she'd sanctioned his doing so at the end. But that had only been because she'd thought the issue academic, the world almost finished and little hope left for the saving of it. But the end hadn't come, and she'd died in the act of preservation. He felt honor-bound to keep his silence. Discreet as he was being, however, he couldn't keep from returning to the Grove to find out how its demise was progressing.

The town was still a no-go area when he arrived, police barricades surrounding it. They weren't difficult to bypa.s.s. The Grove's guardians had become lax in their duties in the days since it had been sealed off, given that very few people, whether sightseers, looters or residents, had been foolhardy enough to want to tread its turbulent streets. He slipped through the cordon with ease, and started his exploration of the town. The wind that had driven the fire through Stillbrook the day before had dropped away completely. The smoke of that conflagration had now settled, its taste almost sweet in his mouth, like the smoke from a fire of good wood. It might have been elegiac under different circ.u.mstances, but he'd learned too much about the Grove and its tragedies to indulge such sentiments. It was impossible to view the destruction without regretting the Grove's pa.s.sing. Its worst sin had been hypocrisy-going on its blithe, sunny way willfully concealing its secret self. That self had sweated out fears, and made dreams real for a while, and it had been those fears and dreams, not Jaffe and Fletcher, which had finally torn the Grove apart. The Nunciates had used the town for their arena, but they'd invented nothing in their war that the Grove had not already nurtured and fed in its heart.

He found himself wondering as he walked if perhaps there was some other way to tell the story of the Grove without flying in the face of Tesla's edict. If he forsook Swift, perhaps, and tried to find some poetic mode in which to couch all he'd experienced. It was a route he'd contemplated taking before, but now (as then) he knew without attempting it he'd fail. He'd come to the Grove a literalist, and nothing it had shown him would ever dissuade him from the cult of the re-portable fact.

He made a circuit of the town, only avoiding areas where trespa.s.s would have amounted to suicide, making mental notes of the sights he saw even though he knew he couldn't use them. Then he slipped out again, unchallenged, and returned to L.A., and to more nights filled with replayed memories.

It wasn't the same for Jo-Beth and Howie. They'd had their dark night of the soul on Quiddity's tide, and the nights that followed, back in the Cosm, were dreamless. At least, they woke remembering nothing.

Howie tried to persuade Jo-Beth that they were best going back to Chicago, but she insisted that any such plans were premature. As long as the Grove remained a danger zone, and the bodies there were unrecovered, she wasn't going to leave the vicinity. She didn't doubt that Momma was dead. But until she was found and brought out of the Grove to be given a Christian burial any thought of a life for them both beyond this tragedy was not to be contemplated.

In the meanwhile, they had a lot of healing to do, which they did behind closed doors in a motel in Thousand Oaks close enough to the Grove so that when it was deemed safe to return Jo-Beth would be among the first to do so. The marks that Quiddity had left upon them soon receded into memory, and they were left in a strange limbo. Everything was finished, but nothing new could begin. And, while they waited, a distance grew between them that neither encouraged or intended but neither could prevent. The love that had begun in Butrick's Steak House had instigated a series of cataclysms for which they knew they could not be held responsible, but which haunted them nevertheless. Guilt began to weigh on them as they waited in Thousand Oaks, its influence growing as they healed, and came to realize that unlike dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent Grovers they'd emerged physically unscathed.