"The Great and Secret Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

PART THREE: FREE SPIRITS

Of the hundreds of erotic magazines and films which William Witt purchased as he grew to manhood over the next seventeen years, first by mail order then later taking trips into Los Angeles for that express purpose, his favorites were always those in which he was able to glimpse a life behind the camera. Sometimes the photographer#8212;equipment and all#8212;could be seen reflected in a mirror behind the performers. Sometimes the hand of a technician, or a fluffer#8212;someone hired to keep the stars aroused between shots#8212;would be caught on the edge of the frame, like the limb of a lover just exiled from the bed.

Such obvious errors were relatively rare. More frequent#8212;and to William's mind far more telling#8212;were subtler signs of the reality behind the scene he was witnessing. The times when a performer, offered a multitude of sins and not certain which hole to pleasure next, glanced off camera for instruction; or when a leg was speedily shifted because the power behind the lens had yelled that it obscured the field of action.

At such times, when the fiction he was aroused by#8212; which was not quite a fiction, because hard was hard, and could not be faked#8212;William felt he understood Palomo Grove better. Something lived behind the life of the town, directing its daily processes with such selflessness no one but he knew it was there. And even he would forget. Months would go by, and he'd go about his business, which was real estate, forgetting the hidden hand. Then, like in the porno, he'd glimpse something. Maybe a look in the eye of one of the older residents, or a crack in the street, or water running down the Hill from an oversprinkled lawn. Any of these were enough to make him remember the lake, and the League, and know that all the town seemed to be was a fiction (not quite a fiction, because flesh was flesh and could not be faked), and he was one of the performers in its strange story.

That story had proceeded without a drama to equal that of the League in the years since the sealing of the caves. Marked town though it was, the Grove prospered, and Witt with it. As Los Angeles grew in size and affluence towns out in the Simi Valley, the Grove among them, became dormitories for the metropolis. The price of the town's real estate rose steeply in the late seventies, just about the time when William entered the business. It rose again, particularly in Windbluff, when several minor stars elected to take houses on the Hill, conferring on the locale a chic it had hitherto lacked. The biggest of the houses, a palatial residence with a panoramic view of the town, and the valley beyond, was bought by the comedian Buddy Vance, who at the time had the highest-rated TV show on any of the networks. A little lower down the hill the cowboy actor Raymond Cobb demolished a house and built on the spot his own sprawling ranch, complete with a pool in the shape of a sheriff's badge. Between Vance's house and Cobb's lay a house entirely concealed by trees occupied by the silent star Helena Davis, who in her day had been the most gossiped-about actress in Hollywood. Now in her late seventies she was a complete recluse, which only fuelled rumors in the Grove whenever a young man appeared in town#8212;always six foot, always blond#8212;and declared himself a friend of Miss Davis. Their presence earned the house its nickname: Iniquity's Den.

There were other imports from Los Angeles. A Health Club opened up in the Mall, and was quickly oversubscribed. The craze for Szechuan restaurants brought two such establishments, both sufficiently patronized to survive the competition. Style stores flourished, offering Deco, American Naive and simple kitsch. The demand for space was so heavy the Mall gained a second floor. Businesses which the Grove would never have supported in its early days were now indispensable. The pool supply store, the nail sculpture and tanning service, the karate school.

Once in a while, sitting waiting for a pedicure, or in the pet shop while the kids chose between three kinds of chinchilla, a newcomer might mention a rumor they'd heard about the town. Hadn't something happened here, way back when? If there was a long-standing Grover in the vicinity the conversation would very quickly be steered into less controversial territory. Although a generation had grown up in the intervening years there was still a sense among the natives, as they liked to call themselves, that the League of Virgins was better forgotten.

There were some in the town, however, who would never be able to forget. William was one, of course. The others he still followed as they went about their lives. Joyce McGuire, a quiet, intensely religious woman who had brought up Tommy-Ray and Jo-Beth without the benefit of a husband. Her folks had moved to Florida some years back, leaving the house to their daughter and grandchildren. She was now virtually unseen beyond its walls. Hotchkiss, who had lost his wife to a lawyer from San Diego seventeen years her senior, and seemed never quite to have recovered from her desertion. The Farrell family, who had moved out of town to Thousand Oaks, only to find that their reputations had followed them. They'd eventually relocated to Louisiana, taking Arleen with them. She had never fully recovered. It was#8212;William had heard#8212;a good week if she strung more than ten words together. Jocelyn Farrell, her younger sister, had married and come back to live in Blue Spruce. He saw her on occasion, when she came to visit friends in town. The families were still very much part of the Grove's history; yet though William was on nodding acquaintance with them all#8212;the McGuires, Jim Hotchkiss, even Jocelyn Farrell#8212;there was never a word exchanged between them.

There didn't need to be. They all knew what they knew.

And knowing, lived in expectation.

The young man was virtually monochrome, his shoulder-length hair, which curled at his neck, black, his eyes as dark behind his round spectacles, his skin too white to be that of a Californian. His teeth were whiter still, though he seldom smiled. Didn't do much speaking either, come to that. In company, he stammered.

Even the Pontiac convertible he parked in the Mall was white, though its bodywork had been rusted by snow and salt from a dozen Chicago winters. It had got him across country, but there'd been a few close calls along the way. The time was coming when he was going to have to take it out into a field and shoot it. Meanwhile, if anyone needed evidence of a stranger in Palomo Grove they only had to cast their eye along the row of automobiles.

Or indeed, over him. He felt hopelessly out of place in his corduroys and his shabby jacket#8212;(too long in the arms, too tight across the chest, like every jacket he'd ever bought).

This was a town where they measured your worth by the name on your sneakers. He didn't wear sneakers; he wore black leather high-tops that he'd use day in, day out until they fell apart, whereupon he'd buy an identical pair. Out of place or not, he was here for a good reason, and the sooner he got started the better he'd start feeling.

First, he needed directions. He selected a Frozen Yoghurt store as the emptiest along the row, and sauntered in. The welcome that met him from the other side of the counter was so warm he almost thought he'd been recognized.

"Hi! How can I help you?"

"I'm...new," he said. Dumb remark, he thought. "What I mean is, is there any place...any place I can buy a map?"

"You mean of California?"

"No. Palomo Grove," he said, keeping the sentences short. That way he stammered less.

The grin on the far side of the counter broadened.

"Don't need a map," it said. "The town's not that big."

"OK. How about a hotel?"

"Sure. Easy. There's one real close. Or else there's a new place, up in Stillbrook Village."

"Which is the cheapest?"

"The Terrace. It's just two minutes' drive, round the back of the Mall."

"Sounds perfect."

The smile he got in return said: everything's perfect here. He could almost believe it too. The polished cars shone in the lot; the signs pointing him round to the back of the shopping center gleamed; the motel facade#8212;with another sign#8212; Welcome to Palomo Grove, The Prosperous Haven#8212;was as brightly painted as a Saturday morning cartoon. He was glad, when he'd secured a room, to pull down the blind against the daylight, and lurk a little.

The last stretch of the drive had left him weary, so he decided to perk his system up with some exercises and a shower. The machine, as he referred to his body, had been in a driver's seat too long; it needed a working over. He warmed up with ten minutes of shadow sparrings, a combination of kicks and punches, followed by a favorite cocktail of specialized kicks: axe, jump crescent, spinning hook and jump spinning back kicks. As usual, what warmed up his muscles heated his mind. By the time he got to his leg-lifts and sirups he was ready to take on half of Palomo Grove to get an answer to the question he'd come here asking.

Which was: who is Howard Katz? Me wasn't a good enough answer any more. Me was just the machine. He needed more information than that.

It was Wendy who'd asked the question, in that long night of debate which had ended in her leaving him.

"I like you, Howie," she'd said. "But I can't love you. And you know why? Because I don't know you."

"You know what I am?" Howie had replied. "A man with a hole in his middle."

"That's a weird way to put it."

"It's a weird way to feel."

Weird, but true. Where others had some sense of themselves as people#8212;ambition, opinion, religion#8212;he just had this pitiful unfixedness. Those who liked him#8212;Wendy, Ritchie, Lem#8212;were patient with him. They waited through his stumblings and stammerings to hear what he had to say, and seemed to find some value in his comments. (You're my holy fool, Lem had once told Howie; a remark which Howie was still pondering.) But to the rest of the world he was Katz the klutz. They didn't bait him openly#8212;he was too fit to be taken on hand to hand, even by heavyweights#8212;but he knew what they said behind his back, and it always amounted to the same thing: Katz had a piece missing.

That Wendy had finally given up on him was too much to bear. Too hurt to show his face he'd brooded on the conversation for the best part of a week. Suddenly, the solution came clear. If there was anyplace on earth he'd understand the how and why of himself it was surely the town where he'd been born.

He raised the blind and looked out at the light. It was pearly; the air sweet-smelling. He couldn't imagine why his mother would ever have left this pretty place for the bitter winter winds and smothering summers of Chicago. Now that she was dead (suddenly, in her sleep) he would have to solve that mystery for himself; and perhaps, in its solving, fill the hole that haunted the machine.

Just as she reached the front room, Momma called down from her room, her timing as faultless as ever.

"Jo-Beth? Are you there? Jo-Beth?"

Always the same falling note in the voice, that seemed to warn: be loving to me now because I may not be here tomorrow. Perhaps not even the next hour.

"Honey, are you still there?"

"You know I am, Momma."

"Can I have a word?"

"I'm late for work."

"Just a minute. Please. What's a minute?"

"I'm coming. Don't get upset. I'm coming."

Jo-Beth started upstairs. How many times a day did she cover this route? Her life was being counted out in stairs climbed and descended, climbed and descended.

"What is it, Momma?"

Joyce McGuire lay in her usual position: on the sofa beside the open window, a pillow beneath her head. She didn't look sick; but most of the time she was. The specialists came, and looked, and charged their fees, and left again shrugging. Nothing wrong physically, they said. Sound heart, sound lungs, sound spine. It's between her ears she's not so well. But that was news Momma didn't want to hear. Momma had once known a girl who'd gone mad, and been hospitalized, and never come out again. That made her more afraid of madness than of anything. She wouldn't have the word spoken in the house.

"Will you have the Pastor call me?" Joyce said. "Maybe he'll come over tonight."

"He's a very busy man, Momma."

"Not too busy for me," Joyce said. She was in her thirty-ninth year but she behaved like a woman twice that age. The slow way she raised her head from the pillow as if every inch was a triumph over gravity; the fluttering hands and eyelids; that perpetual sigh in her voice. She had cast herself as a movie consumptive, and would not be dissuaded from the role by mere medical opinion. She dressed for the role, in sickroom pastels; she let her hair, which was a rich brunette, grow long, not caring to fashion it or pin it up. She wore no trace of make-up, which further enhanced the impression of a woman tottering on the tip of the abyss. All in all, Jo-Beth was glad Momma no longer went out in public. People would talk. But that left her here, in the house, calling her daughter up and down the stairs. Up and down, up and down.

When, as now, Jo-Beth's irritation reached screaming pitch she reminded herself that her mother had her reasons for this withdrawal. Life hadn't been easy for an unmarried woman bringing up her children in a town as judgmental as the Grove. She'd earned her malady in censure and humiliation.

"I'll get Pastor John to call," Jo-Beth said. "Now listen, Momma, I've got to go."

"I know, honey, I know."

Jo-Beth returned to the door, but Joyce called after her.

"No kiss?" she said.

"Momma#8212;"

"You never miss kissing me."

Dutifully Jo-Beth went back to the window, and kissed her mother on the cheek.

"You take care," Joyce said.

"I'm fine."

"I don't like you working late."

"This is not New York, Momma."

Joyce's eyes flickered towards the window, from which she watched the world go by.

"Makes no difference," she said, the lightness going from her voice. "There's no place safe."

It was a familiar speech. Jo-Beth had been hearing it, in one version or another, since childhood. Talk of the world as a Valley of Death, haunted by faces capable of unspeakable malice. That was the chief comfort Pastor John gave Momma. They agreed on the presence of the Devil in the world; in Palomo Grove.

"I'll see you in the morning," Jo-Beth said.

"I love you, honey."

"I love you too, Momma."

Jo-Beth closed the door and started downstairs.

"Is she asleep?"

Tommy-Ray was at the foot of the flight.

"No. She's not."

"Damn."

"You should go in and see her."

"I know I should. Only she's going to give me a hard time about Wednesday."

"You were drunk," she said. "Hard liquor, she kept saying. True?"

"What do you think? If we'd been brought up like normal kids, with liquor around the house, it wouldn't go to my head."

"So it's her fault you got drunk?"

"You've got something against me, too, haven't you? Shit. Everybody's got something against me."

Jo-Beth smiled, and put her arms around her brother. "No, Tommy, they haven't. They all think you're wonderful and you know it."

"You too?"

"Me too."

She kissed him, lightly, then went to the mirror to check her appearance.

"Pretty as a picture," he said, coming to stand beside her. "Both of us."

"Your ego," she said. "It's getting worse."

"That's why you love me," he said, gazing at their twin reflections. "Am I growing more like you or you like me?"

"Neither."

"Ever seen two faces more alike?"

She smiled. There was an extraordinary resemblance between them. A delicacy in Tommy-Ray's bones matched by clarity in hers which had both of them idolized. She liked nothing better than to walk out hand in hand with her brother, knowing she had beside her a companion as attractive as any girl could wish, and knowing he felt the same. Even among the forced beauties of the Venice boardwalk they turned heads.

But in the last few months they hadn't gone out together. She'd been working long hours at the Steak House, and he'd been out with his pals among the beach crowd: Scan, Andy and the rest. She missed the contact.

"Have you been feeling weird these last couple of days?" he asked, out of nowhere.

"What kind of funny?"

"I don't know. Probably just me. Only I feel like everything's coming to an end."

"It's almost summer. Everything's just beginning."

"Yeah, I know...but Andy's gone off to college, so fuck him. Scan's got this girl in L.A., and he's real private with her. I don't know. I'm left here waiting, and I don't know what for."

"So don't."

"Don't what?"

"Wait. Take off somewhere."

"I want to. But..." He studied her face in the mirror. "Is it true? You don't feel...strange?"

She returned his look, not certain she wanted to admit to the dreams she'd been having, in which she was being carried by the tide, and all her life was waving to her from the shore. But if not to Tommy, whom she loved and trusted more than any creature alive, to whom?

"OK. I admit it." she said, "I do feel something."

"What'"

She shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe I'm waiting too."

"Do you know whatfor?"

"Nope."

"Neither do I."

"Don't we make a pair?"

She reran the conversation with Tommy as she drove down to the Mall. He had, as usual, articulated their shared feelings. The last few weeks had been charged with anticipation. Something was going to happen soon. Her dreams knew it. Her bones knew it. She only hoped it was not delayed, because she was coming to the point, with Momma and the Grove, and the job at the Steak House, when she would lose her cool completely. It was a race now, between the fuse on her patience and the something on the horizon. If it hadn't come by summer, she thought (whatever it was, however unlikely), then she'd up and go looking for it.

Nobody seemed to walk much in this town, Howie noticed. On his three-quarter-hour stroll up and back down the Hill he encountered only five pedestrians, and they all had children or dogs in tow to justify their waywardness. Short though this initial journey was it took him to a fair vantage point from which to grasp something of the town's lay-out. It also sharpened his appetite.

Beef for the desperado, he thought, and selected But-rick's Steak House from the eating places available in the Mall. It was not large, and not more than half full. He took a table at the window, opened the tattered copy of Hesse's Siddhartha, and continued his struggle with the text, which was in the original German. The book had belonged to his mother, who had read and re-read it many times#8212;though he could not remember her so much as uttering a word of the language she was apparently fluent in. He was not. Reading the book was like an interior stuttering; he fought for the sense, catching it only to lose it again.

"Something to drink?" the waitress asked him.

He was about to say "Coke" when his life changed.

Jo-Beth stepped over the threshold of Butrick's the way she had three nights a week for the last seven months, but tonight it was as if every other time had been a rehearsal for this stepping; this turning; this meeting of eyes with the young man sitting at table five. She took him in with a glance. His mouth was half open. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. There was a book in his hand. Its owner's name she didn't know, couldn 't know. She'd never set eyes on him before. Yet he watched her with the same recognition she knew was on her own face.

It was like being born, he thought, seeing this face. Like coming out of a safe place into an adventure that would take his breath away. There was nothing more beautiful in all the world than the soft curve of her lips as she smiled at him.

And smiling now, like a perfect flirt. Stop it, she told herself, look away! He'll think you're out of your mind staring. But then he's staring too, isn't he?

I'll keep looking#8212;as long as she keeps looking

#8212;as long as he keeps looking#8212;

"Jo-Beth!"

The summons came from the kitchen. She blinked.

"Did you say a Coke?" the waitress asked him.

Jo-Beth glanced towards the kitchen#8212;Murray was calling her, she had to go#8212;then back at the boy with the book. He still had his eyes fixed on her.

"Yes," she saw him say.

The word was for her, she knew. Yes, go, he said, I'll still be here.

She nodded, and went.

The whole encounter occupied maybe five seconds, but it left them both trembling.

In the kitchen Murray was his usual martyred self.

"Where have you been?"

"Two minutes late, Murray."

"I make it ten. There's a party of three in the corner It's your table."

"I'm putting my apron on."

"Hurry."

Howie watched the kitchen, door for her re-emergence Siddhartha forgotten. When she appeared she didn't look his way but went to serve a table on the far side of the restaurant He wasn't distressed that she failed to look. An understanding had been reached between them in that first exchange of gazes. He would wait all night if need be, and all through tomorrow if that was what it took, until she had finished the work and looked at him again.

In the darkness below Palomo Grove the inspirers of these children still held on to each other as they had when they'd first fallen to earth, neither willing to risk the other's freedom Even when they'd risen to touch the bathers, they'd gone together, like twins joined at the hip. Fletcher had been slow comprehending the Jaff's intention that day. He'd thought the man planned to draw his wretched terata out of the girls But his mischief had been more ambitious than that. It was the making of children he was about, and, squalid as it was, Fletcher had been obliged to do the same. He was not proud of his assault. As news of its consequences had reached them his shame had deepened. Once, sitting by a window with Raul, he had dreamed of being sky. Instead his war with the Jaff had reduced him to a spoiler of innocents, whose futures they had blighted with touch. The Jaff had taken no little pleasure in Fletcher's distress. Many times, as the years in darkness passed, Fletcher would sense his enemy's thoughts turning to the children they'd made, and wondering which would come first to save their true father.

Time did not mean to them what it had meant before the Nuncio. They didn't hunger, nor did they sleep. Buried together like lovers, they waited in the rock. Sometimes they could hear voices from the overground, echoing down passages opened by the subtle but perpetual grinding of the earth. But these snatches offered no clue to the progress of their children, with whom their mental links were at best ten-uous. Or at least had been, until tonight.

Tonight their offspring had met, and contact was suddenly clear, as though their children had understood something of their own natures, seeing their perfect opposites, and had unwittingly opened their minds to the creators. Fletcher found himself in the head of a youth called Howard, the son of Trudi Katz. Through the boy's eyes he saw his enemy's child just as the Jaff saw Howie from his daughter's head.

This was the moment they'd waited for. The war they'd fought half way across America had exhausted them both. But their children were in the world to fight for them now; to finish the battle that had been left unresolved for two decades. This time, it would be to the death.

Or so they'd expected. Now, for the first time in their lives, Fletcher and the Jaff shared the same pain#8212;like a single spike thrust through both their souls.

This was not war, damn it. This was nothing like war.

"Lost your appetite?" the waitress wanted to know.

"Guess I have," Howie replied.

"You want me to take it away?"

"Yeah."

"You want coffee? Dessert?"

"Another Coke."

"One Coke."

Jo-Beth was in the kitchen when Beverly came through with the plate.

"Waste of good steak," Beverly said.

"What's his name?" Jo-Beth wanted to know.

"What am I, a dating service? I didn't ask."

"Go ask."

"You ask. He wants another Coke."

"Thanks. Will you look after my table?"

"Just call me Cupid."

Jo-Beth had managed to keep her mind on her job and her eyes off the boy for half an hour: enough was enough. She poured a Coke, and took it out. To her horror, the table was empty. She almost dropped the glass; the sight of the empty chair made her feel physically sick. Then, out of the corner of her eye, the sight of him emerging from the restroom, and returning to the table. He saw her, and smiled. She crossed to the table, ignoring two calls for service en route. She already knew the question she was going to ask first: it had been on her mind from the start. But he was there with the same enquiry before her.

"Do we know each other?"

And of course she knew the answer.

"No," she said.

"Only when you...you...you..." He was stumbling over the word, the muscles in his jaw working like he was chewing gum. "...You..." he kept saying, "...you..."

"I thought the same," she said, hoping her finishing his thought wouldn't offend. It seemed not to. He gave a smile, his face relaxing.

"It's strange," she said. "You're not from the Grove, are you?"

"No. Chicago."

"That's a ways to come."

"I was born here, though."

"You were?"

"My name's Howard Katz. Howie."

"I'm Jo-Beth..."

"What time do you finish here?"

"Around eleven. It's good you came in tonight. I'm only here Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. If you'd come in tomorrow you would have missed me."

"We'd have found each other," he said, and the certainty in his statement made her want to cry.

"I have to go back to work," she told him.

"I'll wait," he replied.

At eleven-ten they stepped out of Butrick's together. The night was warm. Not a pleasant, breezy warmth, but humid.

"Why did you come to the Grove?" she asked him as they walked to her car.

"To meet you."

She laughed.

"Why not?" he said.

"All right. So why did you leave in the first place?"

"My mother moved us to Chicago when I was only a few weeks old. She never really spoke much about the ol' home town. When she did it was like she was talking about hell. I suppose I wanted to see for myself. Maybe understand her and me a bit better."

"Is she still in Chicago?"

"She's dead. Died two years ago."

"That's sad. What about your father?"

"I don't have one. Well...I mean...is...is#8212;" He started to stumble, fought it, and won. "I never knew him," he said.

"This gets weirder."

"Why?"

"It's the same for me. I don't know who my father is either."

"Doesn't matter much, does it?"

"It used to. Less now. I've got a twin, see? Tommy-Ray. He's always been there for me. You must meet Tommy. You'll love him. Everybody does."

"And you. I bet every...every...everybody loves you too."

"Meaning?"

"You're beautiful. I'm going to be competing with half the guys in Ventura County, right?"

"Nope."

"Don't believe you."

"Oh they look. But they don't touch."

"Me included?"

She stopped walking. "I don't know you, Howie. At least, I do and I don't. Like when I saw you in the Steak House, I recognized you from somewhere. Except that I've never been to Chicago and you've not been in the Grove since#8212;" She suddenly frowned. "How old are you?" she said.

"Eighteen last April."

Her frown deepened.

"What?" he said.

"Me too."

"Huh?"

"Eighteen last April. The fourteenth."

"I'm on the second."

"This is getting very strange, don't you think? Me thinking I knew you. You thinking the same."

"It makes you uneasy."

"Am I that obvious?"

"Yes. I never saw...saw...I never saw a face so transparent. Makes me want to kiss it."

In the rock, the spirits writhed. Every word of seduction they'd heard had been a twisting of the blade. But they were powerless to prevent the exchange. All they could do was sit in their children's heads and listen.

"Kiss me," she said.

They shuddered.

Howie put his hand on her face.

#8212;They shuddered till the ground around them shook.#8212; She took a half step towards him and put her smiling lips on his.

#8212;Till cracks opened up in the concrete that eighteen years before had sealed them up. Enough! they screamed in their children's ears, enough! Enough!

"Did you feel something?" he said.

She laughed. "Yes," she said. "I think the earth moved."

The girls went down to the water twice. The second time was the morning after the night on which Howard Ralph Katz met Jo-Beth Mc-Guire. A bright morning, the muggy air of the evening before blown away on a wind that promised cool gusts to mellow the heat of the afternoon.

Buddy Vance had slept alone again, up in that bed he'd had built for three. Three in a bed#8212;he'd said (and unfortunately been quoted saying)#8212;was hog-heaven. Two was marriage; and hell. He'd had enough of that to be certain it didn't suit him but it would have made a morning as fine as this finer still to have known there was a woman waiting at the end of it, even if she was a wife. His affair with Ellen had proved too perverse to last; he would have to dismiss her from his employ very soon. Meanwhile his empty bed made this new early morning regime a little easier. With nothing to seduce him back to the mattress it wasn't so difficult to put on his jogging gear and take the road down the Hill.

Buddy was fifty-four. Jogging made him feel twice that But too many of his contemporaries had died on him of late, his sometime agent Stanley Goldhammer being the most recent departure, and they'd all died of the same excesses that he was still thoroughly addicted to. The cigars, the booze, the dope. Of all his vices women were the healthiest, but even they were a pleasure to be taken in moderation these days. He couldn't make love through the night the way he'd been able to in his thirties. On a few traumatic occasions recently he hadn't been able to perform at all. It had been that failure which had sent him to his doctor, demanding a panacea, whatever the price.

"There isn't one," Tharp had said. He'd been treating Buddy since the TV years, when The Buddy Vance Show had topped the ratings every week, and a joke he told at eight at night would be on the lips of every American the following morning. Tharp knew the man once billed as the funniest man in the world inside out.

"You're doing your body harm, Buddy, every damn day. And you say you don't want to die. You still want to be playing Vegas at a hundred."

"Right."

"On present progress, I give you another ten years. That's if you're lucky. You're overweight, you're overstressed. I've seen healthier corpses."

"I do the gags, Lou."

"Yeah, and I fill in the death certificates. So start taking care of yourself, for Christ's sake, or you're going to go the way Stanley went."

"You think I don't think about that?"

"I know you do, Bud. I know."

Tharp stood up and walked round to Buddy's side of the desk. On the wall were signed photographs of the stars whom he'd advised and treated. So many great names. Most of them dead; too many of them prematurely. Fame had its price.

"I'm glad you're coming to your senses. If you're really serious about this..."

"I'm here aren't I? How much more fucking serious do I have to get? You know how I hate talking about this shit. I never did a death gag in my life, Lou. You know that? Not once. Anything else. Anything. But not that!"

"It's got to be faced sooner or later."

"I'll take later."

"OK, so I'll have a health plan drawn up for you. Diet; exercise; the works. But I'm telling you now, Buddy, it won't make pleasant reading!"

"I heard somewhere: laughter makes you live longer."

"Show me where it says comedians live forever, I'll show you a tomb with a quip on it."

"Yeah. So when do I begin?"

"Start today. Throw out the malts and the nose-candy, and try using that pool of yours once in a while."

"It needs cleaning."

"So get it cleaned."

That was the easy part. Buddy had Ellen call the Pool service as soon as he got home and they sent somebody up the following day. The health plan, as Tharp had warned, was a tougher call, but whenever his will faltered he thought of the way he looked in the mirror some mornings, and the fact that his dick was only visible if he held his gut in so hard it ached. When vanity failed he thought of death, but only as a last resort.

He'd always been an early riser, so getting up for a morning run wasn't a great chore. The sidewalks were empty, and often#8212;as today#8212;he'd make his way down the Hill and through the East Grove to the woods, where the ground didn't bruise the soles the same way the concrete did, and his panting was set to birdsong. On such days the run was strictly a one-way journey; he'd have Jose Luis bring the limo down the Hill and meet him when he emerged from the woods, the car stocked with towels and iced tea. Then they'd head back up to Coney Eye, as he'd dubbed the estate, the easy way: on wheels. Health was one thing; masochism, at least in public, quite another.

The run had other benefits besides firming up his belly. He had an hour or so alone to get to grips with anything that was troubling him. Today, inevitably, his thoughts were of Rochelle. The divorce settlement would be finalized this week, and his sixth marriage would be history. It would be the second shortest of the six. His forty-two days with Shashi had been the fastest, ending with a shot that had come so close to blowing off his balls his sweat ran cold whenever he thought of it. Not that he'd spent more than a month with Rochelle in the year they'd been married. After the honeymoon, and its little surprises, she'd taken herself back to Fort Worth to calculate her alimony. It had been a mismatch from the beginning. He should have realized that, the first time she failed to laugh at his routine, which was, coincidentally, the first time she heard his routine. But of all his wives, including Elizabeth, she was the most physically alluring. Stone-faced she'd been, but the sculptor had genius.

He was thinking of her face as he came off the sidewalk and hit the woods. Maybe he should call her; ask her to come back to Coney for one final try. He'd done it before, with Diane, and they'd had the best two months of their years together, before the old resentments had set in afresh. But that had been Diane, this was Rochelle. It was useless attempting to project behavior patterns from one woman to the next. They were all so gloriously different. Men were a dull bunch by comparison: dowdy and mono-minded. Next time around he wanted to be born a lesbian.

Off in the distance, he heard laughter; the unmistakable giggling of young girls. A strange sound to hear so early in the morning, He stopped running and listened for it again, but the air was suddenly empty of all other sounds, even bird-song. The only noises he could hear were internal: the labor-ings of his system. Had he imagined the laughter? It was perfectly possible, his thoughts being as full of women as they were. But as he prepared to about-face and leave the thicket to its songlessness, the giggling came again, and with it an odd, almost hallucinatory, change in the scene around him. The sound seemed to animate the entire wood. It brought movement to the leaves, it brightened the sunlight. More than that: it changed the very direction of the sun. In the silence, the light had been pallid, its source still low in the east. On the cue of laughter it became noon-day bright, pouring down on the upturned faces of the leaves.

Buddy neither believed nor disbelieved his eyes: he simply stood before the experience as before feminine beauty, mesmerized. Only when the third round of laughter began did he grasp its direction, and start off at a run towards it, the light still vacillating.

A few yards on he saw a movement ahead of him through the trees. Bare skin. A girl stripping off her underwear. Beyond her was another girl, this one blonde, and strikingly attractive, beginning to do the same. He knew instinctively they weren't quite real, but he still advanced cautiously, for fear of startling them. Could illusions be startled? He didn't want to risk it; not with such pretty sights to see. The blonde girl was the last one undressed. There were three others, he counted, already wading out into a lake that flickered on the rim of solidity. Its ripples threw light up on to the blonde's face#8212;Arleen, they named her, as they shouted back to the shore. Advancing from tree to tree, he got to within ten feet of the lake's edge. Arleen was in up to her thighs now. Though she bent to cup water in her hands and splash it on her body it was virtually invisible. The girls who were in deeper than she, and swimming, seemed to be floating in midair.

Ghosts, he half-thought; these are ghosts. I'm spying on the past, being rerun in front of me. The thought propelled him from hiding. If his assumption was correct then they might vanish at any moment and he wanted to drink their glory down in gulps before they did.

There was no trace of the clothes they'd shed in the grass where he stood, nor any sign#8212;when one or the other of them glanced back towards the shore#8212;that they saw him there.

"Don't go too far," one of the quartet yelled to her companion. The advice was ignored. The girl was moving further from the shore, her legs spreading and closing, spreading and closing as she swam. Not since the first wet dreams of his adolescence could he remember an experience as erotic as this, watching these creatures suspended in the gleaming air, their lower bodies subtly blurred by the element that bore them up, but not so much he could not enjoy their every detail.

"Warm!" yelled the adventurer, who was treading water a good distance from him, "it's warm out here."

"Are you kidding?"

"Come and feel!"

Her words inspired further ambition in Buddy. He'd seen so much. Dare he now touch? If they couldn't see him#8212; and they plainly couldn't#8212;where was the harm in getting so close he could run his fingertips along their spines?

The water made no sound as he stepped into the lake; nor did he feel so much as a touch against his ankles and shins as he waded deeper. It buoyed Arleen up well enough however. She was floating on the lake's surface, her hair spread around her head, her gentle strokes taking her further from him. He hurried in pursuit, the water no brake upon him, halving the distance between himself and the girl in seconds. His arms were extended, his eyes fixed upon the pinkness of her labia as she kicked away from him.

The adventurer had begun to shout something, but he ignored her agitation. To touch Arleen was all he could think about. To put his hand upon her and she not protest, but go on swimming, while he had his way. In his haste his foot snagged on something. Arms still reaching for the girl he fell, face down. The jolt brought him to his senses enough to interpret the shouts from the deeper water. They were no longer cries of pleasure, but of alarm. He raised his head from the ground. The two furthest swimmers were struggling in midair, turning their faces up to the sky.

"Oh my Lord," he said.

They were drowning. Ghosts, he'd called them moments ago, not really thinking about what that name implied. Here was the sickening truth. The swimming party had come to grief in these phantom waters. He'd been ogling the dead.

Revolted with himself, he wanted to retreat, but a perverse obligation to this tragedy kept him watching.

All four of them were caught up in the same turmoil now, thrashing in the air, their faces darkening as they fought for breath. How was it possible? They looked to be drowning in four or five feet of water. Had some current taken hold of them? It seemed unlikely, in water so shallow and so apparently placid.

"Help them..." he found himself saying. "Why doesn't somebody help them?"

As though he might lend aid himself he started towards them. Arleen was closest to him. All the beauty had gone from her face. It was contorted by desperation and terror. Suddenly her wide eyes seemed to see something in the water beneath her feet. Her struggling ceased, and a look of utter surrender took its place. She was giving up life.

"Don't," Buddy murmured, reaching for her as if his arms might lift her up out of the past and carry her back to life. At the very moment his flesh met that of the girl, he knew this was fatal business for them both. He was too late in his regrets, however. The ground beneath them trembled. He looked down. There was only a thin cover of earth there, he saw, sustaining a meager crop of grass. Beneath the earth, gray rock; or was it concrete? Yes! Concrete! A hole in the ground had been plugged here, but the seal was fracturing in front of him, cracks widening in the concrete.

He looked back towards the edge of the lake, and solid ground, but a rift had already opened between him and safety, a slab of concrete sliding into it a yard from his toes. Icy air rose from underground.

He looked back towards the swimmers, but the mirage was receding. As it went he caught the same look on all the four faces, eyes rolled up so they showed solid white, mouths open to drink death down. They hadn't perished in shallow water, he now understood. This had been a pit when they'd come swimming here, and it had claimed them as it was now claiming him: them with water, him with wraiths.

He started to howl for help, as the violence in the ground mounted, the concrete grinding itself to dust between his feet. Perhaps some other early-morning jogger would hear him, and come to his aid. But quickly; it had to be quickly.

Who was he kidding? And he, a kidder. Nobody was going to come. He was going to die. For fuck's sake, he was going to die.

The rift between him and good ground had widened considerably, but leaping it was his only hope for salvation. He had to be fast, before the concrete beneath him slid into the pit, taking him with it. It was now or never.

He jumped. It was a good jump too. Another few inches and he'd have made it to safety. But a few were everything. He snatched at the air, short of his target, and fell.

One moment the sun was still shining on the top of his head. The next, darkness, icy darkness, and he was plummeting through it with cobs of concrete hurtling past him on the same downward journey. He heard them crack against the face of the rock as they went; then realized it was he who was making the noise. It was the breaking of his bones and back he could hear as he fell. And fell and fell.

The day began earlier for Howie than he'd ordinarily have welcomed after sleeping so little, but once he was up and exercising he felt good about being awake. It was a crime to lie in bed on a morning so fine. He bought himself a soda from the machine and sat at the window, gazing at the sky and musing on what the day might bring.

Liar; not of the day at all. Of Jo-Beth; only of Jo-Beth. Her eyes, her smile, her voice, her skin, her scent, her secrets. He watched the sky, and saw her, and was obsessed. This was a first for him. He'd never felt an emotion as strong as that possessing him now. Twice in the night he'd woken in a sudden sweat. He couldn't remember the dreams that had brought it on, but she was in them, for certain. How could she not be? He had to go find her. Every hour he spent out of her company was a wasted hour; every moment not seeing her he was blind; every moment not touching her, numb.

She'd told him, as they'd parted the previous night, that she worked at Butrick's during the evening, and at a book store during the day. Given the size of the Mall, it wouldn't be too difficult to locate her work place. He picked up a bag of doughnuts to fill the hole not eating the previous night had left. That other hole, the one he'd come here to heal, was very far from his thoughts. He wandered along the rows of businesses, looking for her store. He found it, between a dog-grooming service and a real estate office. Like many of the stores, it was still closed, opening time, according to the sign on the door, still three quarters of an hour off. He sat down in the steadily warming sun, and ate, and waited.

Her instinct, from the moment she'd opened her eyes, was to forget about work today, and go find Howie. The events of the previous night had run and re-run in her dreams, changed each time in some subtle way, as though they might be alternative realities, a few of an infinite selection born from the same encounter. But among such possibilities she could conceive of none that did not contain him. He had been there, waiting for her, from her first breath; her cells were certain of it. In some imponderable way she and Howie belonged together.

She knew very well that if any of her friends had confessed such sentiments she'd have politely dismissed them as ludicrous. That was not to say she'd not moped over a few faces, of course; turned up the radio when a particular love song was played. But even as she'd listened she'd known it was all a distraction from an unmelodious reality. She saw a perfect victim of that reality every day of her life. Her mother, living like a prisoner#8212;both of the house, and of the past#8212; talking, on those days when she could muster the will to talk, of hopes she'd had, and the friends she'd shared them with. Until now that sad sight had kept Jo-Beth's romantic ambitions, indeed any ambition, in check.

But what had happened between herself and the Chicago boy would not end the way her mother's one great affair had ended, with her deserted, and the man in question so despised she could not bring herself to name him. If all the Sunday teachings she'd dutifully attended had instructed her in anything, it was that revelation came when and where least expected. To Joseph Smith, on a farm in Palmyra, New York; news of the Book of Mormon, revealed to him by an angel. Why not to her then, in circumstances no more promising? Stepping into Butrick's Steak House; standing in a parking lot with a man she knew from everywhere and nowhere?

Tommy-Ray was in the kitchen, his perusal as sharp as the scent of the coffee he was brewing. He looked like he'd slept in his clothes.

"Late night?" she said.

"For both of us."

"Not particularly," she said. "I was home before midnight."

"You didn't sleep though."

"On and off."

"You stayed awake. I heard you."

That was unlikely, she knew. Their bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house, and his route to the bathroom didn't take him within earshot of her.

"So?" he said.

"So what?"

"Talk to me."

"Tommy?" There was an agitation in his demeanor that unnerved her. "What's wrong with you?"

"I heard you," he said again. "I kept hearing you, all through the night. Something happened to you last night. Didn't it?"

He couldn't know about Howie. Only Beverly had any clue as to what had gone on at the Steak House, and she wouldn't have had time to spread rumors, even if she'd had a mind to, which was doubtful. She had enough secrets of her own to keep from the vine. Besides, what was there to tell? That she'd made eyes at a diner? Kissed him in the parking lot? What did any of that matter to Tommy-Ray?

"Something happened last night," he was still saying. "I felt some kind of change. But whatever we were waiting for...it didn't come to me. So it must have come to you, Jo-Beth. Whatever it is, it came to you."

"Want to pour me some of that coffee?"

"Answer me."

"What's to answer?"

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"You're lying," he remarked, with more bafflement than accusation. "Why are you lying to me?"

It was a reasonable question. She wasn't ashamed of Howie, or what she felt for him. She'd shared every victory and defeat of her eighteen years with Tommy-Ray. He wouldn't go blabbing this secret to Momma or Pastor John. But the looks he kept giving her were odd; she couldn't read them. And there was that talk of hearing her through the night. Had he been listening at her door?

"I have to get down to the store," she said. "Or I'll be real late."

"I'll come with you," he said.

"What for?"

"The ride."

"Tommy..."

He smiled at her. "What's wrong with giving your brother a ride?" he said. She was almost taken in by the performance, until she nodded her acquiescence and caught the smile dropping from his lips.

"We have to trust each other," he said, once they were in the car and moving. "Like we always have."

"I know that."

"Because we're strong together, right?" He was staring through the window, glassy-eyed. "And right now I need to feel strong."

"You need to get some sleep. Why don't you let me drive you back? It doesn't matter if I'm late."

He shook his head. "Hate that house," he said.

"What a thing to say."

"It's true. We both hate it. It gives me bad dreams."

"It's not the house, Tommy."

"Yes, it is. The house, and Momma, and being in this fucking town! Look at it!" Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was raging. "Look at this shit! Don't you want to tear the whole fucking place apart?" His volume was nerve-shredding in the confines of the car. "I know you do," he said, staring at her, eyes now wild and wide. "Don't lie to me, little sister,"

"I'm not your little sister, Tommy," she said.

"I'm thirty-five seconds older," he said. This had always been a joke between them. Suddenly it was power-play. "Thirty-five seconds more in this shit-hole."

"Stop talking stupid," she said, bringing the car to a sudden halt. "I'm not listening to this. You can get out and walk."

"You want me shouting in the street?" he said. "I'll do it. Don't think I won't. I'll scream till their fucking houses fall down!"

"You're behaving like an asshole," she said.

"Well, there's a word I don't hear from my little sister's lips too often," he said, with smug satisfaction. "Something's got into both of us this morning."

He was right. She found his rage igniting her in a way she'd never allowed it to before. Twins they were, and in so many ways similar, but he had always been the more openly rebellious of the two. She had played the quiescent daughter, concealing the contempt she'd felt for the Grove's hypocrisies because Momma, so much its victim, still needed its approval. But there were times when she'd envied Tommy-Ray's open contempt, and longed to spit in the eye of propriety the way he had, knowing he'd be forgiven his trespasses upon payment of a smile. He'd had it easy, all those years. His tirade against the town was narcissism; he was in love with himself as rebel. And it was spoiling a morning she'd wanted to luxuriate in.

"We'll talk tonight, Tommy," she said.

"Will we?"

"I just said we would."

"We have to help each other."

"I know."

"Especially now."

He was suddenly hushed, as though all the rage had gone from him in a single breath, and with it all his energy.

"I'm afraid," he said, very quietly.

"There's nothing to be afraid of, Tommy. You're just tired. You should go home and sleep."

"Yeah."

They were at the Mall. She didn't bother to park the car. "Take it home," she said. "Lois will run me back this evening."

As she went to get out of the car he took hold of her arm, his fingers gripping her so hard it hurt.

"Tommy#8212; " she said.

"You really mean it?" he said. "There's nothing to be afraid of?"

"No," she said.

He leaned over to kiss her.

"I trust you," he said, his lips very close to hers. His face filled her sight; his hand held her arm as though he possessed her.

"Enough, Tommy," she said, pulling her arm free. "Go home."

She got out, slamming rather than closing the car door, deliberately not looking back at him.

"Jo-Beth."

Ahead of her, Howie. Her stomach flipped at the sight of him. Behind her, she heard a car-horn blare, and glanced back to see that Tommy-Ray had not taken the wheel of the car, which was blocking access for several other vehicles. He was staring at her; reaching for the handle of the door; getting out. The horns multiplied. Somebody began to shout at him to get out of the way, but he ignored them. His attention was fixed upon Jo-Beth. It was too late for her to signal Howie away. The look on Tommy-Ray's face made it plain he'd understood the whole story from the smile of welcome on Howie's face.

She looked back at Howie, feeling an ashen despair.

"Well lookee here," she heard Tommy-Ray say behind her.

It was more than despair; it was fear.

"Howie#8212;" she began.

"Christ, was I dumb," Tommy-Ray went on.

She tried a smile as she turned back to him. "Tommy," she said, "I want you to meet Howie."

She'd never seen a look on Tommy-Ray's face like the look she was witnessing now; hadn't known those idolized features capable of such malice.

"Howie?" he said. "As in Howard?"

She nodded, glancing back at Howie. "I'd like you to meet my brother," she said. "My twin brother. Howie, this is Tommy-Ray."

Both men stepped forward to shake hands, bringing them into her vision at the same time. The sun shone with equal strength on both, but it didn't flatter Tommy-Ray, despite his tan. He looked sickly beneath the veneer of health he wore; his eyes sunk without a gleam, his skin too tightly drawn over his cheeks and temples. He looks dead, she found herself thinking. Tommy-Ray looks dead.

Though Howie extended his hand to be shaken Tommy-Ray ignored it, suddenly turning to his sister.

"Later," he said, so softly.

His murmur was almost drowned out by the din of complaints from behind him but she caught its menace clearly enough. Having spoken he turned his back and returned to the car. She couldn't see the mollifying smile he was putting on, but she could imagine it. Mr. Golden, raising his arms in mock-surrender, knowing his captors didn't have a hope.

"What was that about?" Howie said.

"I don't exactly know. He's been odd since#8212;"

She was going to say since yesterday, but she'd seen a canker in his beauty moments ago that must have been there always, except that she#8212;like the rest of the world#8212;had been too dazzled to recognize it.

"Does he need help?" Howie asked.

"I think it's better we let him go."

"Jo-Beth!" somebody called. A middle-aged woman was striding towards them, both dress and features plain to the point of severity.

"Was that Tommy-Ray?" she said as she approached.

"Yes it was."

"He never stops by any longer." She had come to a halt a yard from Howie, staring at him with a look of mild puzzlement on her face. "Are you coming to the store, Jo-Beth?" she said, not looking away from Howie. "We're already late opening."

"I'm coming."

"Is your friend coming too?" the woman asked pointedly.

"Oh yes...I'm sorry...Howie...this is Lois Knapp."

"Mrs., " the woman put in, as though her marital status were a talisman against strange young men.

"Lois...this is Howie Katz."

"Katz?" Mrs. Knapp replied. "Katz?" She removed her gaze from Howie, and studied her watch. "Five minutes late," she said.

"It's no problem," Jo-Beth said. "We never get anyone in before noon."

Mrs. Knapp looked shocked at this indiscretion.

"The Lord's work is not to be taken lightly," she remarked. "Please be quick." Then she stalked off. "Fun lady," Howie commented.

"She's not as bad as she looks."

"That'd be difficult."

"I'd better go."

"Why?" Howie said. "It's a beautiful day. We could go someplace. Make the most of the weather."

"It'll be a beautiful day tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. This is California, Howie."

"Come with me anyway."

"Let me try to make my peace with Lois first. I don't want to be on everyone's shit list. It'll upset Momma."

"So when?"

"When what?"

"When will you be free?"

"You don't give up, do you?"

"Nope."

"I'll tell Lois I'm going back home to look after Tommy-Ray this afternoon. Tell her he's sick. It's only half a lie. Then I'll come by the motel. How's that?"

"Promise?"

"Promise." She began to move away, then said: "What's wrong?"

"Don't want to...kiss...kiss me in public, huh?"

"Certainly not."

"How about in private?"

She half-heartedly shushed him as she backed away.

"Just say yes."

"Howie."

"Just say yes."

"Yes."

"See? It's real easy."

In the late morning, as she and Lois sat sipping ice water in the otherwise deserted store, the older woman said: "Howard Katz."

"What about him?" Jo-Beth said, preparing herself for a lecture on behavior with the opposite sex.

"I couldn't think where I knew the name from."

"And now you remember?"

"A woman who lived in the Grove. 'Way back," she said, then turned her attention to wiping a ring of water from the counter with her napkin. Her silence, and the effort she gave to this minor mopping, suggested she was happy to let the subject drop if Jo-Beth chose not to pursue it. Yet she'd felt obliged to raise the issue. Why?

"Was she a friend of yours?" Jo-Beth asked.

"Not of mine."

"Of Momma's?"

"Yes," Lois said, still mopping, though the counter was dry.

"Yes. She was one of your momma's friends."

Suddenly, it came clear.

"One of the four," Jo-Beth said. "She was one of the four."

"I believe she was."

"And she had children?"

"You know, I don't remember."

This was the closest a woman of Lois's scrupulousness came to lying. Jo-Beth called her on it.

"You remember," she said. "Please tell me."

"Yes. I guess I do remember. She had a boy."

"Howard."

Lois nodded.

"You're sure?" Jo-Beth said.

"Yes. I'm sure."

Now it was Jo-Beth who kept her silence, while in her head she'd tried to re-evaluate the events of recent days in the light of this discovery. What did her dreams, and Howie's appearance, and Tommy-Ray's sickness have to do with each other, and with the story she'd heard in ten different versions of the bathing party that had ended in death, insanity and children?

Perhaps Momma knew.

Buddy Vance's driver Jose Luis waited at their agreed rendezvous for fifty minutes before deciding that his boss must have made his way up the Hill under his own power. He called Coney on the car phone. Ellen was at the house but the boss wasn't. They debated what was best to do, and agreed he'd wait with the car the full hour then drive back via the route the boss would be likeliest to take.

He was nowhere along that route. Nor had he got home ahead of his ride. Again they debated the options, Jose Luis tactfully avoiding mention of the likeliest: that somewhere along the way he'd encountered female company. After sixteen years in Mr. Vance's employ he knew his boss's skill with the ladies verged on the supernatural. He would come home when he'd performed his magic.

For Buddy, there was no pain. He was thankful for the fact, but not so self-deceiving as to ignore its significance. His body was surely so messed up his brain had simply overloaded on agony, and pulled the plugs.

The darkness that enclosed him was without qualification; expert only in blinding him. Or perhaps his eyes were out; dashed from his head on the way down. Whatever the reason, detached from sight and feeling, he floated, and while he floated he calculated. First, the time it would take for Jose Luis to realize his boss wasn't coming home: two hours at the outside. His route through the woods would not be difficult to follow; and once they reached the fissure his peril would be self-evident. They'd be down after him by noon. On the surface and having his bones mended by the middle of the afternoon.

Perhaps it was almost midday already.

The only means he had of calculating time's passing was his heartbeat, which he could hear in his head. He began to count. If he could get some sense of how long a minute lasted he'd be able to hold on to that span of time, and after sixty, know he'd lived an hour. But no sooner had he started counting than his head started a different calculation altogether#8230;

How long have I lived, he thought. Not breathed, not existed, but actually lived? Fifty-four years since birth: how many weeks was that? How many hours? Better think of it year by year; it was easier. One year was three hundred and sixty days, give or take a few. Say he slept a third of that. One hundred and twenty days in slumberland. Oh Lord, already the moments dwindled. Half an hour a day on the John, or emptying his bladder. That was another seven and a half days a year, just doing the dirt. And shaving and showering, another ten days; and eating another thirty or forty; and all of this multiplied by fifty-four years...

He began to sob. Get me out of here, he murmured, please God get me out of here, and I'll live like I never lived, I'll make every hour, every minute (even sleeping, even shitting) a minute spent trying to understand, so that when the next darkness comes along I won't be so lost.

At eleven Jose Luis got in the car and drove back down the Hill to see if he could spot the boss somewhere on the street. Drawing a blank there he called in at the Food Stop in the Mall, where they'd named a sandwich in honor of Mr. Vance's patronage (flatteringly, it was mostly meat), then at the record store, where the boss would frequently purchase a thousand dollars' worth of stock. While quizzing Ryder, who owned the place, a customer came and announced to any who were interested that there was some serious shit going down in the East Grove, and did somebody get shot?

The road down to the woods was closed by the time Jose Luis arrived, a solitary cop directing traffic to turn around.

"No way through," he told Jose Luis. "The road's closed."

"What happened? Who got shot?"

"Nobody got shot. It's just a crack in the road."

Jose Luis was out of the car now, staring past the cop to the woods.

"My boss," he said, knowing he needn't name the owner of the limo, "he was running down here this morning."

"So?"

"He hasn't come back yet."

"Oh shit. You'd better follow me."

They made their way through the trees in a silence broken only by barely coherent messages coming through on the cop's radio, all of which he ignored, until the thicket opened into a clearing. Several uniformed police were setting up barriers at its fringes to prevent anyone straying where Jose Luis was now led. The ground beneath his feet was cracked, and the cracks widened as the cop led him to where his Chief was standing, staring at the earth. Long before he came near the spot Jose Luis knew what lay ahead. The crack in the street and those he'd stepped over to reach this place were the consequence of a larger disturbance: a crevice fully ten feet across, opening into a devouring darkness.

"What's he want?" the Chief demanded, jabbing his finger in Jose Luis's direction. "We're keeping this under wraps."

"Buddy Vance," the cop said.

"What about him?"

"He's missing," Jose Luis said.

"He went running#8212;" the cop explained.

"Let him tell it," the Chief said.

"This is where he goes running every morning. Only today he hasn't come back."

"Buddy Vance?" the Chief said. "The comedian?"

"Yeah."

The Chief's gaze left Jose Luis and returned to the hole.

"Oh my Lord," he said.

"How deep is it?" Jose Luis asked.

"Huh?"

"The crack."

"It's not a crack. It's a fucking abyss. I dropped a stone down a minute ago. I'm still waiting for it to hit bottom."

The realization that he was alone came to Buddy slowly, like a memory stirred up from the silt at the bottom of his brain. Indeed at first he thought it was a memory, of a sand storm he'd been caught in once, on his third honeymoon, in Egypt. But he was lost and guideless in this maelstrom as he'd not been then. And it was not sand that stung his eyes back into sight, nor wind that beat his ears into hearing. It was another power entirely, less natural than a storm, and trapped as no storm had ever been here in a chimney of stone. He saw the hole he'd fallen down for the first time, stretching above him to a sunlit sky so far from him no hint of its reassurance touched him. Whatever ghosts haunted this place, spinning themselves into creation in front of him, they surely came from a time before his species was a gleam in evolution's eye. Things awesomely simple; powers of fire and ice.

He was not so wrong; and yet completely. The forms emerging from the darkness a short distance from where he lay seemed in one moment to resemble men like himself, and in the next unalloyed energies, wrapped around each other like champions in a war of snakes, sent from their tribes to strangle the life from each other. The vision ignited his nerves as well as his senses. The pain he'd been spared seeped into his consciousness, the trickle becoming first a stream and then a flood. He felt as though he was laid on knives, their points slicing between his vertebrae, puncturing his innards.

Too weak even to moan, all he could be was a mute, suffering witness of the spectacle in front of him, and hope that salvation or death came quickly, to put him out of this agony. Best death, he thought. A godless sonofabitch like him had no hope of redemption, unless the holy books were wrong and fornicators, drunkards and blasphemers were fit for paradise. Better death, and be done with it. The joke ended here.

I want to die, he thought.

As he formed the intention, one of the entities battling in front of him turned his way. He saw a face in the storm. It was bearded, its flesh so swelled with emotion it seemed to dwarf the body it was set upon, like that of a fetus: skull domed, eyes vast. The terror he felt when it laid its gaze on him was nothing to that which he felt when its arms reached for him. He wanted to crawl away into some niche and escape the touch of the spirit's fingers, but his body was beyond coaxing or bullying.

"I am the Jaff," he heard the bearded spirit say. "Give me your mind, I want terata. "

As the fingertips grazed Buddy's face he felt a spurt of power, white like lightning, cocaine, or semen, run through his head and down into his anatomy. With it, the recognition that he'd made an error. The split flesh and broken bone was not all he was. Despite his immoralities, there was something in him the Jaff coveted; a corner of his being which this occupying force could profit by. He'd called it terata. Buddy had no idea what that word meant. But he understood all too clearly the terror when the spirit entered him. The touch was lightning, burning a path into his essential self. And a drug too, making images of that invasion cavort in his mind's eye. And jism? That as well, or else why did a life he'd never had before, a creature born in his pith from the Jaff's rape, leap out of him now?

He glimpsed it as it went. It was pale and primitive. No face, but legs by the scrabbling dozen. No mind, either, except to do the Jaff's will. The bearded face laughed to see it. Withdrawing his fingers from Buddy, the spirit let his other arm drop from the neck of his enemy and, riding the terata headed up the rock chimney towards the sun.

The remaining combatant fell back against the cavern wall. From where he lay Buddy caught a glimpse of the man. He looked much less the warrior than his opponent, and consequently more brutalized by their exchange. His body was wasted, his expression one of weary distraction. He stared up the rock chimney.

"Jaffe!" he called, his shout shaking dust from the shelves Buddy had struck on his way down. There was no answer from the shaft. The man looked down towards Buddy, narrowing his eyes.

"I'm Fletcher," he said, his voice mellifluous. He moved towards Buddy, trailing a subtle light. "Forget your pain."

Buddy tried his damnedest to say: help me, but he didn't need to. Fletcher's very proximity soothed the agonies he felt.

"Imagine with me," Fletcher said. "Your fondest wish."

To die, Buddy thought.

The spirit heard the unspoken reply.

"No," he said. "Don't imagine death. Please don't imagine death. I can't arm myself with that."

Arm yourself? Buddy thought.

"Against the Jaff."

Who are you?

"Men once. Spirits now. Enemies forever. You have to help me. I need the last squeezings of your mind, or I go to war with him naked."

Sorry, I already gave, Buddy thought. You saw him do the taking. And by the way, what was that thing?

"The terata? Your primal fears made solid. He's riding to the world on it." Fletcher looked up the chimney again. "But he won't break surface yet. The day's too bright for him."

Is it still day?

"Yes."

How do you know?

"The process of the sun still moves me, even here. I wanted to be sky, Vance. Instead, two decades I've lived in darkness, with the Jaff at my throat. Now he's taking the war overground, and I need arms against him, plucked out of your head."

There's nothing left, Buddy said. I'm finished.

"Quiddity must be preserved," Fletcher said.

Quiddity?

"The dream-sea. You might even see its island, as you die. It's wonderful; I envy you the freedom to leave this world..."

Heaven you mean? Buddy thought. Is it Heaven you mean? If so, I haven't got a chance.

"Heaven's only one of many stories, told on the shores of Ephemeris. There are hundreds, and you'll know them all. So don't be afraid. Only give me a little of your mind, so that Quiddity may be preserved."

Who from?

"The Jaff, who else?"

Buddy had never been much of a dreamer. His sleep, when it wasn't drugged or drunk, was that of a man who lived himself to exhaustion daily. After a gig, or a fuck, or both, he would give himself to sleep as to a rehearsal for the final oblivion that called him now. With the fear of nullity a rod to his broken back he scrabbled to make sense of Fletcher's words. A sea; a shore; a place of stories, in which Heaven was just one of many possibilities? How could he have lived his life and never known this place?

"You've known it," Fletcher told him. "You've swum Quiddity twice in your life. The night you were born, and the night you first slept beside the one you loved most in your life. Who was that, Buddy? There've been so many women, right? Which one of them meant most to you? Oh...but of course. In the end, there was only one. Am I right? Your mother."

How the hell did you know that?

"Put it down to a lucky guess..."

Liar!

"OK, so I'm digging around in your thoughts a little. Forgive me the trespass. I need help, Buddy, or the Jaff has me beaten. You don't want that."

No, I don't.

"Imagine for me. Give me something more than regret to make an ally of. Who are your heroes?"

Heroes?

"Picture them for me."

Comedians! All of them.

"An army of comedians? Why not?"

The thought of it made Buddy smile. Why not indeed? Hadn't there been a time when he'd thought his art could cleanse the world of malice? Perhaps an army of holy fools could succeed with laughter where bombs had failed. A sweet, ridiculous vision. Comedians on the battlefields, baring their asses to the guns, and beating the generals over the head with rubber chickens; grinning cannon fodder, confounding the politicians with puns and signing the peace treaties in polka-dotted ink.

His smile became laughter.

"Hold that thought," Fletcher said, reaching into Buddy's mind.

The laughter hurt. Even Fletcher's touch could not mellow the fresh spasms it initiated in Buddy's system.

"Don't die!" he heard Fletcher say. "Not yet! For Quiddity's sake, not yet!"

But it was no use his hollering. The laughter and the pain had hold of Buddy head to toe. He looked at the hovering spirit with tears pouring down his face.

Sorry, he thought. Can't seem to hold on. Don't want to#8212;

Laughter racked him.

#8212;You shouldn't have asked to remember.

"A moment!" said Fletcher. "That's all I need."

Too late. The life went out of him, leaving Fletcher with vapors in his hands too frail to be set against the Jaff.

"Damn you!" Fletcher said, yelling at the corpse as he'd once (so long ago) stood and shouted at Jaffe as he lay on the floor of the Mision de Santa Catrina. This time there was no life to be bullied from the corpse. Buddy was gone. On his face sat an expression both tragic and comical, which was only right. He'd lived his life that way. And in dying he'd assured Palomo Grove of a future burgeoning with such contradictions.

Time in the Grove would play countless tricks in the next few days, but none surely as frustrating to its victim as the stretch between Howie's parting from Jo-Beth and the time when he would see her again. The minutes lengthened to the scale of hours; the hours seemed long enough to produce a generation. He distracted himself as best he could by going to look for his mother's house. That had after all been his ambition here: to learn his nature better by grasping his family tree closer to the root. So far, of course, he'd merely succeeded in adding confusion to confusion. He'd not known himself capable of what he'd felt last night#8212;and felt now even more strongly. This soaring, unreasoning belief that all was well with the world, and could never be made unwell again. The fact of time unravelling the way it was could not best his optimism; it was just a game reality was playing with him, to confirm the absolute authority of what he was feeling.

And to that trick was added another, more subtle still. When he came to the house where his mother had lived it was almost supernaturally unchanged, exactly as in the photographs he'd seen of the place. He stood in the middle of the street and stared at it. There was no traffic in either direction; nor any pedestrians. This corner of the Grove floated in mid-morning languor, and he felt almost as though his mother might appear at the window, a child again, and gaze out at him. That notion would not have occurred to him but for the events of the previous night. The miraculous recognition in that locking of eyes#8212;the sense he'd had (still had) that his encounter with Jo-Beth had been a joy in waiting somewhere#8212;led his mind to make patterns it had never dared before, and this possibility (a place from which a deeper self had drawn knowledge of Jo-Beth and known her imminence) would have been beyond him twenty-four hours before. Again, a loop. The mysteries of their meeting had taken him into realms of supposition which led from love to physics to philosophy and back to love again in such a way that art and science could no longer be distinguished.

Nor indeed, could the sense of mystery he felt, standing here in front of his mother's house, be separated from the mystery of the girl. House, mother, and meeting were one whole extraordinary story. He, the common factor.

He decided against knocking on the door (after all, how much more could he learn from the place?) and was about to retrace his steps when some instinct checked him and instead he continued up the gentle gradient of the street to its summit. There he was startled to find himself presented with a panoramic view of the Grove, looking east over the Mall to where the far fringes of the town gave way to solid foliage. Or nearly solid; here and there the canopy broke, and in one of the gaps quite a crowd appeared to have gathered. Arc-lamps had been erected in a ring, bearing down on some sight too far off for him to see. Were they making a movie down there? He'd spent so much of the morning in a daze he'd noticed almost nothing on his way up here; he could have passed all the stars who'd ever won an Oscar walking these streets and not registered the fact.

While he stood watching, he heard something whisper to him. He looked around. The street behind him was empty. There was no breeze, even here on the brow of his mother's hill, to carry the sound to him. Yet it came again; a sound so close to his ear it was almost inside his head. The voice was soft. It spoke two syllables only, joined into a necklace of sound.

#8212;ardhowardhowardhow#8212;

It didn't take a degree in logic to associate this mystery with whatever was going on in the woods below. He couldn't pretend to understand the processes at work upon and around him. The Grove was clearly a law unto itself, and he'd profited by its enigmas too much to turn his back on future adventures. If pursuit of a steak could bring him the love of his life what might following a whisper bring?

It wasn't difficult to find his way down to the trees. He had the oddest sense, making the descent, that the whole town led that way; that the hillside was a tipped plate, the contents of which might at any moment slide away into the maw of the earth. That image was reinforced when he finally reached the woods and asked what was going on. Nobody seemed much interested in telling him until a kid piped up:

"There's a hole in the ground, an' it swallowed him whole."

"Swallowed who?" Howie wanted to know. It wasn't the boy who replied but the woman with him.

"Buddy Vance," she said. Howie was none the wiser, and his ignorance must have registered, because the woman offered supplementary information. "He used to be a TV star," she said. "Funny guy. My husband loves him."

"Have they brought him up?" he asked.

"Not yet."

"Doesn't matter," the boy chipped in. "He's dead anyhow."

"Is that right?" Howie said.

"Sure," came the woman's reply.

The scene suddenly took on a fresh perspective. This crowd wasn't here to watch a man being snatched from death's door. They were here to claim a glimpse of the body as it was put in the back of an ambulance. All they wanted was to say: I was there, when they brought him up. I saw him, under a sheet. Their morbidity, especially on a day so full of possibilities, revolted him. Whoever had called his name was calling it no longer; or if he was the crowd's lowering presence blocked it. There was no purpose in his staying, when he had eyes to gaze into and lips to kiss. Turning his back on the trees, and his summoner, he headed back to the motel to wait for Jo-Beth's arrival.

Only Abernethy ever called Grillo by his first name. To Saralyn, from the day they'd met to the night they'd parted, he was always Grillo; to every one of his colleagues and friends, the same. To his enemies (and what journalist, particularly a disgraced one, did not court enemies?) he was sometimes That Fuckhead Grillo, or Grillo the Righteous, but always Grillo.

Only Abernethy ever dared: "Nathan?"

"What do you want?"

Grillo had just stepped out of a shower, but the very sound of Abernethy's voice and he was ready to scrub himself down again.

"What are you doing at home?"

"I'm working," Grillo lied. It had been a late night. "The pollution piece, remember?"

"Forget it. Something's come up and I want you there. Buddy Vance#8212;the comedian?#8212;he turned up missing."

"When?"

"This morning."

"Where?"

"Palomo Grove. You know it?"

"It's a name on a freeway sign."

"They're trying to dig him out. It's noon now. How long before you can get there?"

"An hour. Maybe ninety minutes. What's the big interest?"

"You're too young to remember The Buddy Vance Show."

"I caught the reruns."

"Let me tell you something, Nathan my boy#8212;" Of all Abernethy's modes Grillo hated the avuncular most. "#8212;there was a time The Buddy Vance Show emptied the bars. He was a great man and a great American."

"So you want a sob piece?"

"Shit, no. I want the news on his wives, the alcohol, and how come he ended up in Ventura County when he used to swan around Burbank in a limo three fucking blocks long."

"The dirt, in other words."

"There were drugs involved, Nathan," Abernethy said. Grillo could picture the look of mock-sincerity on the man's face. "And our readers need to know."

"They want the dirt, and so do you," Grillo said.

"So sue me," Abernethy said. "Just get your ass out there."

"So we don't even know where he is? Suppose he just took off somewhere?"

"Oh they know where he is," Abernethy said. "They're trying to bring the body up in the next few hours."

"Bring it up? You mean he drowned?"

"I mean he fell down a hole."

Comedians, Grillo thought. Anything for a laugh.

Except that it wasn't funny. When he'd first joined Abernethy's happy band, after the debacle in Boston, it had been a vacation from the heavy-duty investigative journalism in which he'd made his name, and at which, finally, he'd been

Out-maneuvered. The notion of working for a small-circulation scandal sheet like the County Reporter had seemed light relief. Abernethy was a hypocritical buffoon, a born-again Christian to whom forgiveness was a four-letter word. The stories he told Grillo to cover were easy in the gathering and easier still in the telling, given that the Reporter's readers liked their news to perform one function only: the ameliorating of envy. They wanted tales of pain among the high rollers; the flipside of fame. Abernethy knew his congregation well. He'd even brought his biography into the act, making much in his editorials of his conversion from alcoholic to Fundamentalist. Dry and High on the Lord, was how he liked to describe himself. This holy sanction allowed him to peddle the muck he edited with a beatific smile, and allowed his readers to wallow in it without guilt. They were reading stories of the wages of sin. What could be more Christian? For Grillo the joke had long since soured. If he'd thought of telling Abernethy to fuck off once he'd thought of it a hundred times, but where was he going to get a job, hotshot reporter turned dupe that he was, except with a small operation like the Reporter? He'd contemplated other professions, but he had neither the desire nor aptitude to pursue any other. He had wanted to report the world to itself for as long as he could remember. There was something essential about that function. He could imagine himself performing no other. The world knew itself indifferently well. It needed people to tell it the story of its life, daily, or else how could it learn by its mistakes? He had been making headlines of one such mistake#8212;an act of corruption in the Senate#8212;when he discovered (his gut still turned, recalling that moment) that he had been set up by his target's opponents, his position as press prosecutor used to besmirch innocent parties. He had apologized, grovelled and resigned. The matter had been forgotten quickly, as a fresh slew of headlines replaced those that he'd created. Politicians, like scorpions and cockroaches, would be there when the warheads had levelled civilization. But journalists were frail. One miscalculation and their credibility was dust. He had fled West until he met the Pacific. He'd considered throwing himself in, but had instead chosen to work for Abernethy. More and more that seemed like an error.

Look on the bright side, he told himself every day, there's no direction from here but up.

The Grove surprised him. It had all the distinguishing marks of a town created on paper#8212;the central Mall, the cardinal point villages, the sheer order of the streets#8212;but there was a welcome diversity in the styles of the houses, and#8212;perhaps because it was in part built on a hill#8212;a sense that it might have secret reaches.

If the woods had any secrets of their own, they'd been trampled down by the sightseers who'd come to see the exhumation. Grillo flashed his credentials and asked a few questions of one of the cops at the barrier. No, there was no likelihood that the corpse would be raised soon; it had yet to be located. Nor could Grillo speak with any of those in charge of the operation. Come back later, was the suggestion. It looked like good advice. There was very little activity around the fissure. Despite there being tackle of various kinds on the ground nobody seemed to be putting it to use. He decided to risk leaving the scene to make a few calls. He found his way to the Mall and to a public telephone. His first call was to Abernethy, to report that he'd arrived and to enquire whether a photographer had been sent down. Abernethy was away from his desk. Grillo left a message. He had more luck with his second call. The answering machine began playing its familiar message#8212;

"Hi. This is Tesla and Butch. If you want to speak to the dog, I'm out. If it's Butch you need#8212;" only to be interrupted by Tesla.

"Hello?"

"It's Grillo."

"Grillo? Shut the fuck up, Butch! Sorry, Grillo, he's trying to#8212;" the phone was dropped, and there was a good deal of commotion, followed by Tesla's breathless return to the receiver. "That animal. Why did I take him, Grillo?"

"He was the only male who'd live with you."

"Fuck you."

"Your words."

"I said that?"

"You said that."

"Out of my mind! I got good news, Grillo. I got a development deal for one of the screenplays. That castaway picture I wrote last year? They want it rewritten. In space."

"You're going to do it?"

"Why not? I need something produced. Nobody's going to do any of the heavy-duty stuff till I have a hit. So fuck Art, I'm going to be so crass they'll be coming in their pants. And before you say it, don't give me any of that artistic integrity shit. A girl's got to feed herself."

"I know, I know."

"So," she said, "what's new?"

There were a lot of answers to that: a litany. He could tell her about how his hairdresser, with a palmful of straw-blond clippings, had smilingly informed Grillo that he had a bald patch at his crown. Or how this morning, meeting himself in the mirror, he'd decided his long, anemic features, which he'd always hoped would mature into an heroic melancholia, were simply looking doleful. Or that he kept having those damn elevator dreams, trapped between floors with Abernethy and a goat Abernethy kept wanting Grillo to kiss. But he kept the biography to himself; and just said:

"I need help."

"It figures."

"What do you know about Buddy Vance?"

"He's down a hole. It's been on the TV."

"What's his life-story?"

"This is for Abernethy, right?"

"Right."

"So it's just the dirt."

"Got it in one."

"Well, comedians aren't my strongest point. I majored in Sex Goddesses. But I looked him up when I heard the news. Married six times; once to a seventeen-year-old. That lasted forty-two days. His second wife died of an overdose..."

As Grillo had hoped, Tesla had chapter and verse on the Life and Sordid Times of Buddy Vance (n#233;, of all things, Valentino). The addictions to women, controlled substances and fame; the TV series; the films; the fall from grace.

"You can write about that with feeling, Grillo."

"Thanks for nothing."

"I only love you because I hurt you. Or do I mean the other way around?"

"Very funny. Speaking of which: was he?"

"Was he what?"

"Funny."

"Vance? I suppose, in his way. You never saw him?"

"I must have, I suppose. I don't remember the act."

"He had this rubber-face. You looked at him, you laughed. And this weird persona. Half idiot, half slimeball."

"So how come he was so successful with women?"

"The dirt?"

"Of course."

"The enormous appendage."

"Are you kidding me?"

"The biggest dick in television. I got that from an unimpeachable source."

"Who was that?"

"Please, Grillo," Tesla said, aghast. "Do I sound like a girl who'd gossip?"

Grillo laughed. "Thanks for the information. I owe you dinner."

"Sold. Tonight."

"I'll still be here, looks like."

"So I'll come find you."

"Maybe tomorrow, if I'm still here. I'll call you."

"If you don't, you're dead."

"I said I'll call; I'll call. Go back to Castaways in Space."

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do. And Grillo#8212;"

"What?"

Before answering she put the phone down, winning for the third consecutive time the game of who hangs up first they'd been playing since Grillo, in a maudlin stupor one night, had confessed he'd hated goodbyes.

"MOMMA?"

She was sitting by the window as usual. "Pastor John didn't come last night, Jo-Beth. You did call him like you promised?" She read the look on her daughter's face. "You didn't," she said. "How could you forget a thing like that?"

"I'm sorry, Momma."

"You know how I rely upon him. I've got good reason, Jo-Beth. I know you don't think so, but I do."

"No. I believe you. I'll call him later. First...I have to speak to you."

"Shouldn't you be at the store?" Joyce said. "Did you come home sick? I heard Tommy-Ray..."

"Momma, listen to me. I have to ask you something very important."

Joyce looked troubled already. "I can't talk now," she said. "I want the Pastor."

"He'll come later. First: I have to know about a friend of yours."

Joyce said nothing, but her face was all frailty. Jo-Beth had seen her turn that expression on too often to be cowed by it.

"I met a man last night, Momma," she said, determined to be plain in her telling. "His name is Howard Katz. His mother was Trudi Katz."

Joyce's face lost its mask of delicacy. Beneath, was a look eerily like satisfaction. "Didn't I say?" she murmured to herself, turning her head back towards the window.

"Didn't you say what?"

"How could it be over? How could it ever be over?"

"Momma, explain."

"It wasn't an accident. We all knew it wasn't an accident. They had reasons."

"Who had reasons?"

"I need the Pastor."

"Momma: who had reasons?"

Without replying Joyce stood up.

"Where is he?" she said, her voice suddenly loud. She started towards the door. "I have to see him."

"All right, Momma! All right! Calm down."

At the door, she turned back to Jo-Beth. Tears welled in her eyes.

"You mustn't go near Trudi's boy," she said. "You hear me? You mustn't see him, speak to him, even think of him. Promise me."

"I can't promise that. It's stupid."

"You haven't done anything with him, have you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh my Lord, you have."

"I've done nothing."

"Don't lie to me!" Momma demanded, her hands clutched into bony fists. "You must pray, Jo-Beth!"

"I don't want to pray. I came wanting help from you, that's all. I don't need prayers."

"He's got into you already. You never spoke this way before."

"I never felt this way before!" she replied. Tears were perilously close; anger and fear all muddled up. It was no use listening to Momma, she wasn't going to provide anything but calls to prayer. Jo-Beth crossed to the door, her momentum enough to warn Momma that she wouldn't be prevented from leaving. There was no resistance. Momma stepped aside and let her go, but as she headed down the stairs called after her:

"Jo-Beth, come back! I'm sick, Jo-Beth! Jo-Beth! Jo-Beth!"

Howie opened the door to his beauty in tears.

"What's wrong?" he said ushering her in.

She put her hands to her face and sobbed. He wrapped his arms around her. "It's OK," he said. "Nothing's that bad." The sobs diminished steadily, until she disengaged herself from him and stood forlornly in the middle of the room, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"What happened?"

"It's a long story. It goes way back. To your mother and mine."

"They knew each other?"

She nodded. "They were best friends."

"So this was in the stars," he said, smiling.

"I don't think that's the way Momma sees it."

"Why not? Son of her best friend#8212;"

"Did your mother ever tell you why she left the Grove?"

"She was unmarried."

"So's Momma."

"Maybe she's tougher than my#8212;"

"No, what I mean is: maybe that's more than a coincidence. All my life there's been rumors about what happened before I was born. About Momma and her friends."

"I know nothing about this."

"I only know bits and pieces. There were four of them. Your mother; mine; a girl called Carolyn Hotchkiss, whose father still lives in the Grove, and another. I forget her name. Arleen something. They were attacked. Raped, I think."

Howie's smile had long since disappeared.

"Mother?" he said softly. "Why did she never say anything?"

"Who's going to tell their kid they were conceived that way?"

"Oh my God," Howie said. "Raped..."

"Maybe I'm wrong," Jo-Beth said, looking up at Howie. His face was knotted up, as though he'd just been slapped.

"I've lived with these rumors all my life, Howie. I've seen Momma driven half-mad by them. Talking about the Devil all the time. It used to scare me so much, when she started talking about Satan having his eye on me. I used to pray to be invisible, so he couldn't see me."

Howie took his spectacles off and threw them on to the bed.

"I never really told you why I came here, did I?" he said. "I think...think...think it's time I did. I came because I don't have the first clue as to who or what I am. I wanted to find out about the Grove and why it drove my mother out."

"Now you wish you'd never come."

"No. If I hadn't come I wouldn't have met you. Wouldn't have#8212;have...have...fallen in love#8212;"

"With someone who's probably your own sister?"

The slapped look slackened. "No," he said. "I can't believe that."

"I recognized you the moment I stepped into Butrick's. You recognized me. Why?"

"Love at first sight."

"I wish."

"That's what I feel. It's what you feel too. I know it is. You said it is."

"That was before."

"I love you, Jo-Beth."

"You can't. You don't know me."

"I do! And I'm not going to give up on that because of gossip. We don't even know if any of this is true." In his vehemence, all trace of his stammer had disappeared. "This could be all lies, right?"

"It could," she conceded. "But why would anybody invent a story like that? Why did neither your mother nor mine ever tell us who our fathers were?"

"We'll find out."

"Who from?"

"Ask your momma."

"I already tried."

"And?"

"She told me not to go near you. Not to even think of you..."

Her tears had dried as she'd told the story. Now, thinking of Momma again, they began to flow. "But I can't stop that, can I?" she said, appealing for help from the very source she'd been forbidden.

Watching her, Howie longed to be the holy fool Lem had always called him. To have the freedom from censure only idiots, animals and babes-in-arms were granted; to lick and lap at her, and not be slapped away. There was no denying the possibility that she was indeed his sister, but his libido vaulted taboo.

"I think maybe I should go," she said, as though sensing his heat. "Momma wants the Pastor."

"Say a few prayers and maybe I'll go away, you mean?"

"That's not fair."

"Stay awhile, please," he coaxed. "We don't have to talk. We don't have to do anything. Just stay."

"I'm tired."

"So we'll sleep."

He reached and touched her face, very lightly.

"Neither of us got enough sleep last night," he said.

She sighed, and nodded.

"Maybe it'll all come clear if we just let it be."

"I hope."

He excused himself and went through to the bathroom to empty his bladder. By the time he got back she had taken off her shoes and was lying on the bed.

"Room for two?" he said.

She murmured yes. He lay down beside her, trying not to think about what he'd hoped they'd be doing between these sheets.

Again, she sighed.

"It'll be all right," he said. "Sleep."

Most of the audience gathered for Buddy Vance's final show had drifted away by the time Grillo got back to the woods. They'd decided, apparently, that he wasn't worth the wait. With the onlookers dispersed the barrier-guards had become lax. Grillo stepped over the rope and approached the policeman who looked to be in charge of the operation. He introduced himself, and his function.

"Can't tell you much," the man replied, in answer to Grillo's questions. "We've got four climbers going down now, but God knows how long it'll take to raise the body. We haven't found it yet. And Hotchkiss tells us there's all kinds of rivers under there. The corpse could be in the Pacific for all we know."

"Will you work through the night?"

"Looks like we'll have to." He looked at his watch. "We've got maybe four hours of daylight left. Then we'll be relying on the lamps."

"Has anybody investigated these caves before?" Grillo asked. "Are they mapped?"

"Not that I know of. You'd better ask Hotchkiss. He's the guy in black over there."

Again, Grillo made his introductions. Hotchkiss was a

tall, grim individual, with the baggy look of a man who'd lost substantial amounts of weight.

"I understand you're the cave expert," Grillo said.

"Only by default," Hotchkiss replied. "It's just that nobody knows any better." His eyes didn't settle on Grillo for a moment, but roved and roved in search of some place to rest. "What's below us...people don't think much about."

"And you do?"

"Yeah."

"You've made some kind of study of it?"

"In a strictly amateur capacity," Hotchkiss explained. "There's some subjects just take hold of you. This did me."

"So have you been down there yourself?"

Hotchkiss broke his rule, holding his gaze on Grillo's face for a full two seconds before saying: "Until this morning these caves were sealed, Mr. Grillo. I had them sealed myself, many years ago. They were#8212;they are#8212;a danger to innocents."

Innocents, Grillo noted. A strange word to use.

"The policeman I was talking to#8212;"

"Spilmont."

"Right. He said there's rivers down there."

"There's a whole world down there, Mr. Grillo, about which we know next to nothing. And it's changing all the time. Sure, there's rivers, but there's a good deal else besides. Whole species that never see the sun."

"Doesn't sound like much fun."

"They accommodate," Hotchkiss said. "As we all do. They live with their limitations. We're all of us living on a fault line, after all, which could open up at any moment. We accommodate that."

"I try not to think about it."

"That's your way."

"And yours?"

Hotchkiss made a tight, tiny smile, his eyes half-closing as he did so.

"A few years ago I thought about leaving the Grove. It had...bad associations for me."

"But you stayed."

"I discovered I was a sum of my...accommodations," he replied. "When the town goes, so will I."

"When?"

"Palomo Grove is built on bad land. The earth beneath our feet feels solid enough but it's on the move."

"So the whole town could go the way of Buddy Vance? Is that what you're saying?"

"You can quote me as long as you don't name me."

"That's fine by me."

"Got what you need?"

"More than enough."

"No such thing," Hotchkiss observed. "Not with bad news. Excuse me, would you?"

There had been a sudden galvanizing of forces around the fissure. Leaving Grillo with a punchline for his story any comedian would have envied, Hotchkiss strode off to oversee the raising of Buddy Vance.

In his bedroom Tommy-Ray lay and sweated. He'd come out of the sunlight and closed the windows, then drawn the curtains. Sealing the room thus had made it into an oven, but the heat and the gloom soothed him. In their embrace he didn't feel so alone, and exposed, as he'd felt in the bright, clean air of the Grove. Here he could smell his own juices as they oozed from his pores; his own stale breath as it rose from his throat and dropped back down over his face. If Jo-Beth had cheated on him then he would have to seek out new company, and where better to begin than with himself?

He'd heard her come back to the house in the early afternoon, and argue with Momma, but he didn't try to catch the words between them. If her pathetic romance was already falling apart#8212;and why else would she be sobbing on the stairs?#8212; then that was her own damn fault. He had more important business.

Lying in the heat, the strangest pictures came haunting his head. They all rose from a darkness which his curtained room couldn't hope to match. Was that, perhaps, why they were incomplete as yet? Fragments of a scheme he wanted passionately to grasp but that kept slipping from him. In them, there was blood; there was rock; there was a pale, flickering creature his gut turned at seeing. And there was a man he could not make out but who would, if he sweated enough, come clear in front of him.

When he did, the waiting would be over.

First, there was a shout of alarm from the fissure. Men around the hole, Spilmont and Hotchkiss included, set to work to haul the men up, but whatever was taking place underground was too violent to be controlled from the surface. The cop closest to the crevice cried out as the rope he was holding suddenly tightened around his gloved hand and he was jerked towards the lip like a hooked fish. It was Spilmont who saved him, taking hold of the man from behind long enough for him to pull his fingers free of the gloves. As both fell backwards on to the ground the shouts from below multiplied, supplemented by warnings from above.

"It's opening!" somebody yelled. "Jesus Christ, it's opening!"

Grillo was a physical coward until he sniffed news; then he was ready to stand face to face with anything. He pushed past Hotchkiss and a cop to get a better view of what was happening. Nobody stopped him; not with their own safety to consider. Dust was rising from the widening fissure, blinding the anchormen who were holding the ropes on which the retrieval party's life depended. Even as he watched, one of the men was hauled towards the crevice, from which shrieks that suggested massacre were rising. He added his as the earth went to dust beneath his heels. Somebody threw himself past Grillo in the confusion and attempted to snatch at the man but too late. The rope tightened. He was pulled out of sight, leaving his failed savior face down at the edge of the crack. Grillo took three steps towards the survivor, barely able to see either the ground or its absence beneath his feet. He felt its tremors, however, rising through his legs and up his spine, throwing his thoughts into chaos. Instinct sufficed. Legs spread to keep his balance, he reached down for the fallen man. It was Hotchkiss, face bloodied when he'd hit the earth, a dazed look in his eyes. Grillo yelled his name. The man responded by grabbing at Grillo's proffered arm, as the ground around them both split open.

Side by side on the motel bed, neither Jo-Beth nor Howie woke, though both gasped and shuddered like lovers saved from drowning. There had been dreams of water for them both. Of a dark sea which was carrying them towards some wonderful place. But their journey had been interrupted. Something below their dreaming selves had snatched at them, dragging them out of that lulling tide and down into a shaft of rock and pain. Men were screaming all around them as they fell to their deaths, ropes following like obedient snakes.

Somewhere in the confusion they heard each other, each sobbing the other's name, but there wasn't time for reunion before their downward motion was checked and an upward surge caught them. It was icy cold; a torrent of water from a river that had never seen the sun but mounted the chasm now, bearing dead men, dreamers and whatever else occupied this nightmare, before it. The walls became a blur as they rose to meet the sky.

Grillo and Hotchkiss were four yards from the fissure when the waters broke, the violence of the breakage enough to throw them off their feet as a freezing rain fell. It stung Hotchkiss from his daze. He grabbed hold of Grillo's arm, hollering:

"Look at that!"

There was something alive in the flood. Grillo saw it for the briefest of moments#8212;a form, or forms#8212;that seemed human as he glimpsed them but left on his inner eye another impression entirely, like the after-burn of fireworks. He shook the image off and looked again. But whatever he'd seen had gone.

"We got to get out!" he heard Hotchkiss yell. The ground was still cracking. They hauled themselves upright, their feet scrabbling in the mud for purchase, and ran blindly through rain and dust, only knowing they'd reached the perimeter when they tripped over the rope. One of the retrieval team, his hand half gone, lay where the first spurt had dropped him. Beyond rope and body, in the cover of the trees, were Spilmont and a number of cops. The rain came down lightly here, tapping on the canopy like a midsummer shower, while behind the storm from the earth roared itself out.

Soaking with his own sweat, Tommy-Ray stared at the ceiling and laughed. He hadn't had a ride like that since the summer before last, out at Topanga, when a freak tide had thrown up a magnificent swell. He, Andy and Scan had ridden it for hours, high on speed.

"I'm ready," he said, wiping salt-water from his eyes. "Ready and willing. Just come get me, whoever the fuck you are."

Howie looked dead, lying on the bed all bundled up, his teeth clenched, his eyes closed. Jo-Beth backed away, hand to her mouth to block the panic, her words#8212;Dear God forgive me#8212;coming in muffled sobs. They'd done wrong, even lying together on the same bed. It was a crime against the laws of the Lord to dream the way she'd dreamt (of him naked beside her on a warm sea, their hair intertwined the way she'd wanted their bodies to be) and what had that dream brought? Cataclysm! Blood, rock and a terrible rain which had killed him in his sleep.

Dear God, forgive me#8212;

He opened his eyes so suddenly her prayer deserted her. In its place, his name.

"Howie? You're alive."

He unknotted himself, reaching out to claim his spectacles from beside the bed. He put them on. Her shock came into focus.

"You dreamed it too," he said.

"It wasn't like a dream. It was real." She was shaking from head to foot. "What have we done, Howie?"

"Nothing," he said, coughing the growl from his throat. "We've done nothing."

"Momma was right. I shouldn't have#8212;"

"Stop it," he said, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and standing up. "We've done nothing wrong."

"What was that then?" she said.

"A bad dream."

"In both our heads?"

"Maybe it wasn't the same," he said, hoping to calm her.

"I was floating, with you beside me. Then I was underground. Men were screaming#8212;"

"All right#8212;" he said.

"It was the same."

"Yes."

"See?" she said. "Whatever's between us...it's wrong. Maybe it's the Devil's work."

"You don't believe that."

"I don't know what I believe," she said. He moved towards her, but she kept him at bay with a gesture. "Don't, Howie. It's not right. We shouldn't touch each other." She started towards the door. "I have to go."

"This is...is#8230;is...absurd," he said, but no stumbling words of his were going to stop her leaving. She was already fumbling with the security bolt he'd put on when she'd entered.

"I'll get it," he said, leaning past her to open the door. In lieu of any comforting words he kept a silence which she only broke with:

"Goodbye."

"You're not giving us time to think this through."

"I'm afraid, Howie," she said. "You're right, I don't believe the Devil's in this. But if he isn't, who is? Have you got any answers for that?"

She was barely able to keep her emotions in check; she kept gulping air as if trying to swallow, and failing. The sight of her distress made him long to hug her, but what had been invited last night was now forbidden.

"No," he told her. "No answers."

She took the cue of his reply to leave him at the door. He watched her for a count of five, defying himself to stand and let her go, knowing what had happened between them was more significant than anything he'd experienced in eighteen years of breathing the air of the planet. At five, he closed the door.