Grigsby shook his head. "I don't buy that." He smiled sadly. "But I'll tell ya, if that hadda been the idea of the whole thing, it surely did work like a charm."

"Ah," she said, and the smile on her lips looked as sad as his own smile felt. "But did it?"

"How do you mean?"

"For us finally to remove the pain, we must actually experience it, penetrate it. Have you done this, or have you avoided it?"

"Doesn't seem to me like it's the kind of pain a body can avoid real easy."

She frowned slightly. "And yet I notice, Bohb, that you drink quite a lot of alcohol."

What was it today? Everybody and his brown mule was after him about his drinking. "Yeah, well," Grigsby said. "Maybe. But the funny thing is, I been drinkin' a lot less since I met you."

She smiled. "So perhaps you are using me, rather than alcohol, to escape your pain."

Grigsby returned her smile. "Gives me less of a hangover."

She tapped his nose. "So far."

Grigsby laughed. He realized, smack in the middle of his laughter, that he hadn't laughed for a long time. "Well, tell me this," he said. "If ever'body's lookin' to get hurt by the people they hook up with, how do you figure you're gonna get hurt by hookin' up with me? I mean, where's the pain come in?"

She shrugged. Grigsby very much admired the way her b.r.e.a.s.t.s shivered when she shrugged. "Soon I will be leaving," she said. "Even after only this short time, I will find it painful to part."

"Well," Grigsby said, "first off, seems to me that you're talkin' about a whole 'nother thing there. You didn't get hooked up with me just so's you could get unhooked, and then suffer for it. Leastways, I don't think so. And second, you know there ain't no law of nature says you got to be leavin'."

She smiled. "Bohb." Once again she placed her fingertip against his chin. "I enjoy you very much. I liked you from the first time I saw you. I sensed your kindness, and your concern. You are, I think, a good man. Truly. But we are very different, you and I. I have my plans and you have yours. I must continue with my journey. And you must continue with your own. You have unfinished business, I believe. You are still deeply in love with your wife, and this is something with which you must contend. You must either return to her somehow, or you must at last move on."

Grigsby took a sip of his brandy. "But accordin' to you, if me and her got back together, we'd just mess each other up all over again."

"It is possible, I think, for two people to work together, to help each other with this."

Grigsby smiled sadly. "I don't think Clara would go for it."

"Then perhaps it is time for you to continue with your life."

Grigsby sighed again. "I purely do hate it when a woman starts makin' sense."

Mathilde smiled. "But for now, we have some time together, you and I. We have, not love, perhaps, not exactly. But affection." She smiled. "And l.u.s.t, too, of course."

Grigsby grinned. "Sounds to me like you got one h.e.l.l of an idea there." He stubbed out his cigarette, set his gla.s.s on the night table, and turned to reach for her.

LYING IN BED, HE sang it softly to himself: Doe, Doe, Doe.

Doe Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Doe.

Doe Re Mi ...

Doe Re Mine. Elizabeth McCourt Doe is mine.

You are mine, harlot. You are mine, s.l.u.t.

Somewhere, perhaps right at this moment, she was writhing and squirming beneath some s...o...b..ring male, Tabor or Wilde or some other; somewhere she cooed and grunted, gasped and groaned: and she did not know. She did not know that she had been chosen. Did not know that her destiny had been immovably fixed. Did not know that the pa.s.sing hours were carrying her toward them, toward him and the Lords of Light, as surely, as inexorably, as the currents of a river swept refuse and carrion to the waiting sea.

But of course getting her would require every particle of his cunning. She was different from the rest. Although at heart she was as corrupt and foul as the others, as lost as they, finally as doomed, on the surface she was successful, prosperous, one of society's darlings. She had a sponsor: Tabor. She had friends, she had money. She had a lair into which she could retreat, like a scorpion, like a snake.

And Grigsby was still hanging about. b.u.mbling and inept he might be, a drunkard and a clown; still he was persistent. He was watching. He was waiting.

How infuriating it was to be forced to take that slovenly dullard into account.

Sometimes the pressures and the tensions of the work seemed nearly overwhelming. Sometimes the difficulties, the dangers, seemed nearly too much to bear, crowding around him, looming black and weighty overhead. Sometimes, even, he doubted.

She will be mine?

She will be yours, came the deep, raspy, magisterial voice. She will be ours.

What comfort those voices provided him! The absolute certainty throbbing in their tones-how it inspired him!

He had learned that if he stopped fighting it, if he embraced it as a friend, the pain from the ropes would become a part of himself. Instead of lingering at the chafed strips of skin where the hemp bit into his flesh, it would slowly expand, slowly drift through tissue and bone, slowly fill his entire being with a dull red glow, as hot and potent as a smoldering ember of coal. To contain the glow, to prevent it from seeping off, his skin would harden, stiffen, become shiny and brittle, like the sh.e.l.l of a beetle.

The darkness no longer frightened him. Often, in the beginning, he had heard things moving through it. He had heard the feathery whisper of scales as something slithered along the wood of the floor, he had heard the rustle of fur beneath his bed, the click of sharp tiny claws.

But over time he had learned to use it. Now he was not only in it, but of it. While his body lay armored and protected atop the mattress, his. soul merged with the darkness, and together he and the darkness billowed out beyond the confines of the narrow room, out beyond the confines of the house, out into the night sky, out to the very ends of the universe.

He had begun, almost, to dislike the light. Where the darkness was powerful and boundless, the light was frail and petty. Limited. And with the light came the Preacher. And, sometimes, the Harlot, the Red b.i.t.c.h. And, always, each time, a new and different pain.

As now: He heard a door slam, down below. They had returned. His soul swept back into his body and hid itself beneath the sleek smooth sh.e.l.l of his skin.

He heard the footsteps on the stairs, and the unmodulated murmur, the jerky rise and fall, of drunken voices. Both of them were coming.

The door swung open and light swung across the room. In the yellow rectangle at the doorway stood the dark towering form of the Preacher. Swaying slightly, he advanced toward the bed. The floorboards creaked beneath him. In the background, her arms crossed as she leaned against the jamb, her disheveled red hair burning like a flame, stood the Harlot. At the bottom of her round white face, her painted red mouth hung open in a leer.

The Preacher leaned over, put out his hands to feel the mattress. His black bulk blotted out the ceiling.

"Wet again," said the Preacher, and his breath was thick with liquor. "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. You must learn, boy."

His hand moved between the boy's legs, and then pain like a bolt of lightning rattled up the center of the world. "You must learn, boy."

From far off, the boy heard the wild jangling laughter of the Harlot. He stood at the very center of a flat featureless field of pale parched gra.s.s that extended in every direction out to the horizon. Overhead the sky was booming with light, the sun so fierce it had scorched away the blue. In the distance wheeled a small flock of crows, black hieroglyphs sliding down the white of sky. The boy watched until they seemed about to slip between the thin line that separated sky and field.

And just there, just at the point where they vanished, the fissure began. It slashed upward from the horizon into the bare bleached sky, as straight and true as though sliced by a razor, and it stopped directly overhead, where the sun had burned only a moment before. The lips of the gash trembled for a moment, then buckled earthward, splitting apart, and from between them gushed a glistening tumble of entrails. Gigantic coils and loops of pink shiny intestine, monstrous red gleaming chunks of liver and spleen and kidney, gray lumps and strands of brain, spilled in a vast torrent to the field and splattered against it, slopping over one another, heaping themselves in slick steaming piles. The boy sometimes felt the need for comfort now. All too often now those strange periods of blackness would overtake him and sweep him away into that mysterious, timeless limbo. Minutes or hours might pa.s.s before he returned to himself. Fortunately he had learned to sense their approach. He could feel himself becoming attentuated, becoming somehow less real, less substantial, thinning into a pale gray mist within his clothes; and before he allowed himself to slip altogether into transparency he would retreat to the safety of his room. But sometimes, still, when he returned, he would discover himself pacing down a sidewalk he had never seen before, or eating a meal he had not ordered, or engaged in a conversation he had not initiated. On one or two occasions, only his supreme skill at dissembling had saved him.

It was, yes, the result of fatigue. The enormous energy he expended on his mission. The difficulties and the dangers he daily faced and daily defeated.

And yet, paradoxically, it was the mission which provided him with energy, which brought him into contact with the pulse that beat at the very center of creation. Without the mission, he might wisp away entirely, his body disintegrating, dissipating, its isolate atoms floating off into the ether forever. Without it, he might disappear.

He danced, he reeled, he spun like a dervish as he chanted in a language he did not recognize but one he knew was sanctified by the Lords of Light. Sometimes he laughed and sometimes, when he considered how he had been blessed, how he had been graced, he sobbed in grat.i.tude. He required the mission as surely as the mission required him.

Soon.

Yes. And soon he would have her, this Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Soon he would show her the world of wonders that lay just beneath this one, separated from it by a veil that was the thickness, merely, of human skin.

And, yes, it would need every particle of their cunning, his and that of the Lords of Light. But cunning had been needed before and always, from his inexhaustible store, and from theirs, he had supplied it.

Like Grigsby, but of course with infinitely more subtlety and intelligence, he would watch and he would wait. The time would come; that was fated. And when it did, he would be ready.

Soon, yes, he would have her.

Soon.

Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

Doe.

Doe Re Mi.

Doe Re Mine.

"ISN'T THE FOREST LOVELY?" asked Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

"Sorry?" Oscar turned to her. With the reins held loosely his hand, he had been blankly staring at the nodding heads of the plodding pair of horses that drew the carriage.

"The forest. Isn't it lovely?"

Oscar glanced around, noted the large number of pine trees that loomed up rather aggressively on both sides of the narrow dirt track. It was, to be sure, a forest. But lovely? It was a bit too gloomy for his taste, and the trees were a good deal too large; it resembled a typical Teutonic woodland, brooding and dim, which had somehow undergone a lunatic surge of growth.

"Ah," he said. "Yes. Charming."

"It looks primeval, don't you think?" Poised and regal in her red fox coat and matching m.u.f.f, a wide-brimmed bonnet shading her cascade of t.i.tian hair, she appeared today-as she always appeared-stunningly beautiful.

"Primeval, yes," said Oscar. "My very thought."

She put her hand lightly on his forearm. "Oscar," she said, "you seem distracted."

"Not at all." He smiled. "I am merely speechless with pleasure at your company."

She smiled, slid her hand down his sleeve to the back of his hand, squeezed it, and then withdrew her own and slipped it back into the m.u.f.f. Still smiling, she looked off into the tall glowering pine trees.

Normally her touch would have enflamed him, sent all the nerve ends of his body migrating to the patch of skin beneath her fingertips; but at the moment Oscar was in fact distracted. An hour ago, when he had clambered up into the driver's seat of the carriage, he had glanced toward the alleyway across the street from the hotel. And there he had seen (or imagined?) a large shadowy figure suddenly lurch back into the darkness. Only a glimpse it had been, lasting no longer than the blink of an eye.

Since then, he had been trying to persuade himself that the figure had been merely a phantasm, merely one more illusory member of that illusory band of bears which had lately been stalking him.

For why on earth would Biff the Behemoth follow Oscar all the way from Denver to Manitou Springs? Oscar had done him no harm. Indeed, during their encounter, it had been Oscar who was the injured party-having been lobbed through the air to tumble into that disgusting heap of sawdust. If anyone had a right to harbor a grudge, clearly it was he. And he, for his part, was perfectly happy to let bygones be bygones.

If Biff, somewhere deep within the murky corridors of his mind, nursed a desire for revenge, would he not have sought out Dr. Holliday? It was Holliday, not Oscar, who had been the author of Biff's humiliation. Surely even Biff could grasp that fact?

As he had done three or four times since leaving Manitou Springs, Oscar leaned from the carriage and peered behind them. With its twists and turns through the somber pines, the track was visible for only a hundred yards. But those hundred yards were empty. No one, apparently, was following.

Of course not. That lurching shape had been only another trick of nature, a mirage, one of those droll sleights produced by the interplay of light and shade. Like the huge ursine apparition last night-which had metamorphosed into the quite human (if admittedly still somewhat mysterious) form of Dr. Holliday.

He glanced off into the trees. Really, this was a dreary place. Dark, broad, towering trees rising to quite preposterous heights from pools of sunless gloom. It seemed silent and empty; but who knew what sort of creatures were skulking through those sullen depths, following the pa.s.sage of the carriage with hungry yellow eyes? Wolves. Coyotes. Mountain lions. Rattlesnakes the thickness and length of fire hoses.

And of course bears.

No. No bears. The bears were an illusion.

He sat back against the rigid seat of the carriage. Perhaps the portentousness of the occasion had made him a tad uneasy. It was not, after all, every day that one asked a young woman for her hand. (Mother would have said it was not any day that one asked a young woman for her hand when the young woman was a penniless divorcee. But Mother would come around. She must come around, and therefore she would come around.) The silver brooch Oscar had purchased in Denver lay in his topcoat pocket, and now it seemed to him inadequate, trivial, as tawdry as a piece of costume jewelry. It should have been gold; and it should have been a ring.

He would buy her a ring later. Today. As soon as they returned to town.

Could one buy a diamond ring in Manitou Springs?

"There," said Elizabeth McCourt Doe. She pointed to a small clearing along the left side of the track. "There's room for the carriage."

Oscar tugged the reins to the left and the horses drew the carriage off the track. As the animals approached the end of the clearing, he pulled the reins back. The carriage stopped. He set the brake lever, tied the reins to it, then stepped down and a.s.sisted Elizabeth McCourt Doe to the ground.

How could he worry about someone as insignificant as Biff when someone as breathtakingly beautiful as this stood (both physically and metaphorically) within his grasp?

She had brought along blankets (admirable woman!) and also a large wicker hamper. She placed her m.u.f.f on the seat and scooped up the blankets. "You can bring the basket," she said, smiling.

Oscar looked around him, at the forest crowding in, vast and bleak. Lightly-no apprehension here, just a simple, manly curiosity-he asked, "Is it terribly far?"

She shook her head. "A short walk."

He lifted the hamper, which he found to be somewhat on the heavy side, and set off behind her.

The air today was mild. Back in Manitou Springs it had been almost warm. Here, higher up, along the slope of the mountain, it was cooler but still comfortable.

As he trailed behind Elizabeth McCourt Doe, he could smell the dusky fragrance of her perfume, blended now with the drab, prosaic odors of the forest: earth and pine, and also something dank, something heavy and oppressive which must have been mold or fungus, and which reminded him of graveyards and crypts.

Despite his admiration for the woman, her notion of a short walk was one to which he could not wholeheartedly subscribe. They marched for what seemed like miles through the shadows, over glum gray hillocks and around them, deeper and deeper into the dusky wood. (However had she found this place of hers? Guided there by some local Chingachgook?) Beneath a slippery cover of brown pine needles, the ground was soft and spongy, threatening now and then to engulf his shoes, and possibly his entire body. He began to perspire elaborately. The wicker hamper grew increasingly heavy and c.u.mbersome, and he had run out of arms into which he could shift the thing. Perhaps, he thought, he should perch it atop his skull, like a cheerful native bearer, and begin to sing cheerful native bearer songs. Whatever they might be.

Finally the two of them emerged from the gloom into a small sunlit glen. A blue patch of sky hung overhead, stretched taut between the faraway black treetops. At the clearing's opposite side ran the promised brook. It was not, however, babbling. On some earlier occasion it might perhaps have babbled; but today-swollen, presumably, by melt.w.a.ter-it thundered like a small but determined Niagara. Gushing, whooshing, it slapped and slammed against its banks as it blundered down the slope.

So much for the idea of dipping their feet into its laughing water. Any foot dipped into that current would be wrenched off at the ankle.

Elizabeth McCourt Doe spread out one of the blankets and sat down on it, arranging her skirt about her. She looked up, smiling, and patted the blanket. With aching arms, Oscar lowered the basket and sat down beside her, disguising his small gasp of exhaustion as a sigh of pleasure: "Ah!"

She leaned toward him, kissed his cheek, then sat back. "Isn't it perfect?" she asked. Oscar could just make out her voice over the roar of the stream.

"Perfect," he said, and swallowed. His breath was coming in frantic little puffs.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a place like this? Away from all the crowds, all the bustle and noise?"

"Yes," he said. For a day or two, if one had a wealth of provisions and virtually no other choice. "Delightful. You don't care for Denver, then?"

She made a face, shook her head. " It' s so dirty and crowded." She turned to him. "Is London like that?"

He laughed, suddenly lightheaded with relief. This was evidently going to proceed more easily, with far less awkwardness, than he had dared hope. (Why, then, had his heart vaulted from his chest to his head, where it now hammered against his ears?) "Not at all. There are areas in London that are sublime. Filled with gracious homes and lovely parks." And, alas, with spiteful estate agents.