Everville (68 page)

None was so solid, however, as to keep Hany's eyes from wandering in any direction he wished. He could see the picket fence that bounded the backyard and the fine Spanish tile on the front step. He could see up the graceful staircase to the second and third floors, each of which boasted two bathrooms and half a dozen well-appointed bedrooms.

And now, even before the roof had appeared on the house, the souls who had occupied it began to appear, gracing its rooms.

"Ah... " Raul cooed appreciatively, "the ladies." they appeared everywhere. On the landings and in the bedrooms, in the parlors and in the kitchen, their voices and their laughter like whispering music.

"There's Bedelia," Maeve said, "and Hildegard and Jennie, oh my dear Jennie, look at her... "

It was not such a bad place to be, Harry thought, come the end of the world, surrounded by such memories. Though only one or two of the women would have been judged pretty by current standards, there was an air of ease and pleasure here, of a house as much dedicated to laughter as to erotic excess.

As for the clients who'd patronized the establishment, they were like the ghosts of ghosts, gossamer forms passing up and down the stairs and in and out of the bedrooms and bathrooms, their dress and flesh gray.

Once in a while Harry would catch a glimpse of a face, but it was always fleeting, as though the house had conjured the furtiveness of these men, rather than the men themselves; caught them turning from scrutiny, ashamed of their desire.

There was little evidence of shame among the women. they went bare-breasted on the stairs, and naked on the landing. they chatted to one another as they shit or passed water. they helped each other bathe and douche and shave their legs and what lay between. "There, said Maeve, pointing to a prodigiously ample woman sitting in the kitchen, taking fingerfuls of pudding from a porcelain bowl, "that's Mary Elizabeth. You got a lot for your bucks with her. She always had a waiting list. And up there"-she pointed towards a slim, pale girl feeding a parrot from between her teeth-"that's Dolores. And the parrot, what was the parrot's name?" She glanced round at Raul. "Ask Coker," she said.

The answer came in an instant. "Elijah."

Maeve smiled. "Elijah. Of course, Elijah. She swore it spoke prophecies."

"Were you happy here?" Harry asked her.

"It wasn't what I'd expected my life to be," she said. "But yes, I was happy. Probably too happy. That made people envious."

"Is that why they burned the place down?" Harry said, wandering to the stairs to watch Mary Elizabeth ascend. "Because they were envious?"

"That was some of it," she said. "And some of it was eer self-righteousness: they didn't want me and my busiss corrupting the citizens. Can you imagine? Without me, without this house and these women, there wouldn't have been any citizens because there wouldn't have been any city. And they knew that. That's why they waited until they had an excuse-"

"And what was that?"

"Our son, our crazy son, who was too little like his father and too much like me. Coker was always gentle, you see. But there was a streak of the lunatic in the O'Connells, and it came out in Clayton. Not just that, but we made the error of teaching him he was special, telling him he'd have power in his hands one day, because he was a child of two worlds. We should never have done that. It made him think he was above the common decencies; that he had the right to be barbarous if he chose, because he was better than everybody else." She grew pensive. "I saw him once, when he was maybe ten or so, looking up at Harmon's Heights, and I said to him: What are you thinking? And do you know what he said to me? One day, he said, I'll have that hill, and I'll look down on a world of fishes. I've thought so many times, that was the sign. I should have put him out of his misery right there and then. But it had taken Coker and me so much pain and effort to get a child... "

While part of Harry's mind listened to the story of Clayton O'Connell's begetting-how Coker's charms and suits had kept Maeve preternaturally young, but slowed her ovulations to a trickle; how she was almost seventy when she gave birth to the boy-another part turned over what she'd said previously. The child's notion of looking down from Hannon's Heights on a world of fishes rang some vague bell.

"What happened to Clayton?" he asked her, while he puzzled over the problem.

"He was hanged."

"You saw him dead?"

"No. His body was taken by wolves or bears...

And now, thinking of wild beasts up on the mountain, he remembered where he'd heard the words before. "Raul?" he said. "Stay here with Maeve, will you?"

"I'm not leaving." Raul smiled, his face flushed with voyeuristic pleasure.

"Don't you go," Maeve said, as Harry left the bottom of the stairs.

"I'll be back," he replied, "you just keep remembering," and heading off down the hallway he slipped through the unopened front door onto the street.

"Lives are leaves on the story tree," the man who walked on Quiddity had told Tesla. to which she'd replied that she'd never told a story she'd given a damn about.

"Oh, but you did," he'd said. "Yourown... yourown...

It was true, of course. She'd told that story with every blink of her eye, every beat of her heart, with every deed and word, cruel and kind alike.

But here was a mystery; that now, though her heart was no longer beating and her eyes could no longer blink, though she would never again say or do anything in the living world, cruel or kind, the story refused to finish.

She was dead; that much was sure. But the pen moved on, and kept moving. There was more to tell it seemed...

The brightness into which she had fallen was still around her, though she knew it wasn't her eyes that were seeing it, because she could see her own body some distance 1from her, suspended in the light. It lay face-up, arms and legs spread, fingers splayed, in a posture she knew all too well. She'd assembled this image in front of Buddenbaum, half an hour ago: It was the pose of the figure at the center of the medallion. Now it was her dead flesh that took that pose, while her mind drifted around it with a kind of detached curiosity, mildly puzzled as to what all this meant, but suspecting the answer was beyond her comprehension.

In the ground a little way beneath her body-the source of the energies that had transformed the solid ground into a kind of incandescent soup-was the cross itself, and when her spirit looked its way it transported her thoughts in four directions at once, out along the bright paths that ran from its arms. In one direction lay the human journey; a record of the countless men and women who had come to and crossed at this intersection, all of them carrying their freight of dreams. In the opposite direction came a procession of creatures who resembled humanity, but only remotely; exiles from the Metacosm, come to EverVille as a place of pilgrimage, and led by their prophetic marrow to this spot. From a third route came the animals, wild and domesticated alike. Leashed dogs sniffing for a place to piss; migrating birds wheeling overhead before they turned south; the flies that had been a curse to Dolan in his candy shop, the worms that had massed here in their many millions just the summer before. Aspiring forms, even the lowliest.

And finally, the most remote element in this conjunction: the divinities whom she'd helped ensnare.

"What happens next?" Rare Utu had waited to know as the blaze had consumed her. It was a question that no longer vexed Tesla. She had her bliss here and was perfectly content. If her consciousness finally caught up with the facts of her demise and flickered out, so be it. And if the pen continued to move, and the story continued to be told, she would accept that too, willingly. Meanwhile, she would hover, and watch, while the ground ran with brightness in every direction, and the steady processes of decay began their work on the body she'd once met in the mirror.

iv Harry was two blocks from the crossroads, heading off towards the place where the lad was at work, when he heard Buddenbaum calling to him.

"Help me, D'Amour!" he said, stumbling across the street. He had not, it appeared, left the site of his working completely bereft. A down of luminescence clung to his face and hands, an inconsequential reminder of all that he'd failed to acquire. "I don't blame you," he said, backing along the middle of the street ahead of Harry. "She was a friend of yours, so you had to conspire with her. You had no choice."

"There was no conspiracy, Buddenbaum."

"Whether there was or there wasn't, you can't leave her down there, can you?" He was attempting a tone of sweet reason.

"She's dead," said Harry.

"I know that."

"So wherever she's buried, it's academic. Will you just get the hell out of my way?"

"Where are you going?"

"to find Kissoon."

"Kissoon?" Buddenbaum said. "What the Hell good can he do you?"

"More than you can."

"Not true!" Buddenbaum protested. "Just give me a few minutes of your time, and you'll never took back. There'll be no past to look back to. No future either. Just-"

"One immortal day?" Harry shook his head. "Give it up, for God's sake. You had your chance and you blew it."

He turned a corner now, and there, at the other end of the street, was the enemy. He halted for a moment, to try and make some sense of what he was seeing, but the closest of the fires was several streets away, and what illumination it offered only confounded his gaze. One thing was certain: The lad was no longer the chaotic, panicked thing, or things, it had been on the mountaintop. Even from this distance and with so little light he could see that the enemy had sloughed off its ragged coat and moved in th e air like a serpentine engine, its immense form in constant, peristaltic motion.

Harry pulled up his sleeves, to expose his tattoos. Who knew what good they'd do him, probably very little. But he needed all the help he could get.

"What are you going to do?" Buddenbaum wanted to know. "Challenge it to a fistfight? You don't have a chance. Not without some power to wield."

Harry ignored him. Drawing a deep breath, he started down the street towards the lad.

"You think you're being heroic, is that it?" Buddenbaum said. "It's suicide. If you want to do some good, we can help each other. Dig for me, D'Amour."

"Dig?"

Buddenbaum raised his hands in front of him. they were a sickening sight. In his frenzy to reclaim what he'd lost, he'd beaten his flesh to a bloody pulp. Several fingers were askew, their bones broken. "I can't do it myself. And by the time they heal it'll be too late."

"It's not going to happen," Harry said.

"What the fuck do you know about what's going to happen and what isn't?"

"If you were going to act the Art it would have come to you back there. But it didn't."

"That was because of Tesia@'

"Maybe. And maybe you just weren't meant to have it."

Buddenbaum stopped in his tracks. "I won't hear that," he said.

"So don't," Harry replied, stepping around him.

"And I won't be denied what's mine!" Buddenbaum f said, layino, one of his broken hands on Harry's shoulder. "I don't haveomuch in the way of suits left in me," he said, "but I've got enough to cripple you. Maybe even kill you." "And what good would that do you?"

"I would have laid one of my enemies low," Buddenbaum replied.

Harry could feel a pulse of neuralgia pass through his shoulder from Buddenbaum's palm, lending credence to the threat.

"I'm going to give you one more chance," Buddenbaum said.

Hany's tattoos started to itch furiously. His guts twitched. He knew he should run, but the will had gone from his legs. "What are you doing, Owen?" somebody said.

The itch was an ache now, and the twitches almost convulsions. Harry tried to turn his head towards the speaker, but it wouldn't move. All he could do was shift his eyes, and there on the periphery of his vision he saw the boy from the crossroads. His pallid face was bruised and bloodied.

"Let him go, Owen," he said. "Please."

Buddenbaum made a sound Harry couldn't'quite interpret. was it perhaps a sob? "Stay away from me, Seth," he said.

"What happened?" the boy wanted to know.

"I was cheated," Buddenbaum replied, his voice thickening with tears. "I had it in my grasp-"

"And this man took it?"

"No!"

"So, what? You're just killing anybody who gets in your way? You're not that cruel."

"I will be," Buddenbaum said. "From now on, no mercy, no compassionate'

"No love?"

"No love!" he yelled. "So you stay away from me or I'll hurt you too!"

"No you won't," Seth said, his words a gentle certainty Harry felt the pain in his body easing, and the power over his muscles was returned to him. He made no sudden movements, for fear of inflaming Buddenbaum afresh, but slowly turning his head he saw that Seth had lifted the man's hand off Harry's shoulder and had drawn it up to his lips.

"We've all been hurt enough for one lifetime," he said softly, kissing the broken hand. "We've got to start healing, Owen."

"It's too late for that."

"Give me a chance to prove you wrong," the boy replied. Harry looked round at Buddenbaum. His ragc had passed, leaving his face drained of expression.

"You'd better go," Seth said to Harry.

"Will you be all right with him?"

"Sure," Seth replied gently, slipping his arm around Buddenbaum's shoulder. "We'll be fine. We go way back, him and me. Way back." There was no time for further exchange. Leaving the pair to make what peace they could, Harry headed on down the street. In the minute or so since he'd last looked the lad's way it had advanced against the largest building in the vicinity: either the courthouse or the Town Hall, Harry guessed. The site was no more than a hundred and fifty yards ahead of him, and now with every step the lad's pernicious influence grew. He felt its needles at the base of his skull, and the corners of his eyes; heard its witless noise behind the din of the world.