Everville (71 page)

Now she wondered: was it still intact? Still gathering tales of unlikely phenomenon from across the Americas? And the more she wondered, the more the notion of seeing for herself this collection of things out-of-whack and out-ofseason intrigued her. She remembered Grillo giving her a couple of numbers to call if ever she wanted to access the system and leave her own messages, but she'd lost them. The only way to find out whether the Reef was still operational was to go to Omaha and see for herself She didn't want to fly. The idea of relinquishing control of life and limb to a man in a uniform had never appealed to her; and did so now less than ever. If she was to go, it would be on two wheels, like the old days.

She duly had her bike thoroughly overhauled, and on the sixth of October she started the journey that would take her back to the city where many years before Randolph Jaffe had sat in a dead-letter office gathering clues to the mystery that now bided its time in her cells.

t Two Despite her best intentions, Phoebe had failed to dream of Joe that first night lying under Maeve O'Connell's bedroom window. Instead she'd dreamed of Morton. Of all things, Morton. And very unpleasant it proved to be. In this dream she was standing on the shore as it had looked before King Texas had overturned it, down to the birds who'd almost brought her adventures to a premature halt. And there, standing among the flock, dressed only in a vest and his Sunday best socks, was her husband.

Seeing him she instinctively covered her breasts, determined he wasn't going to lay his hands on them ever again, either for pleasure or punishment. As it was, he turned out to have other ideas. Producing a dirty burlap bag from behind his back, he said, "We're going to go down together, Phoebe. You know that's right."

"Down where?" she said to him.

He pointed to the water. "Mere," he said, approaching her while he reached into the bag. There were stones in it, gathered from the shore, and without another word he proceeded to ffimst them into her mouth.

Such was the logic of dreams that she now found her hands were glued to her breasts, and she couldn't raise them to prevent his tormenting her. She had no choice but to swallow the stones. Though some of them were as large as his fist, down they went, one after the other; ten, twenty, thirty. She steadily felt herself growing heavier, the weight carrying her to her knees. The sea had meanwhile crept up the shore and plainly intended to drown her.

She started to struggle, doing her choking best to plead with Morton. "I didn't mean any harm to come to you-" she told him.

"You didn't care," he said.

"I did," she protested, "at the beginning, I loved you. I thought we were going to be happy forever."

"Well, you were wrong," he growled, and started to reach into the bag for what she knew would be the biggest stone of the lot, the stone that would tip her over and leave her struggling in the rising water.

"Bye, bye, Feebs," he said.

"Damn you," she replied. "Why can't you ever see somebody else's point of view?" "Don't want to," he replied.

"You're such a fool-2' "Now, we get to it."

"Damn you! Damn you!" As she spoke she felt her innards churning, grinding the stones in her belly together. She heard them crack and splinter. So did Morton.

"What are you doing?" he said, leaning over her, his breath like an ashtray.

In reply she spat out a hail of fractured stones, which peppered him from head to foot. they struck him like bullets, and he stumbled back into the surf, dropping his burlap bag as he did so. The wounds were not bleeding. The shrapnel she'd spat at him had simply lodged in his body and weighed him down. In seconds the eager waters had covered him and he was gone, leaving Phoebe on the shore, spitting up stone dust.

When she woke up the pillow was wet with saliva.

The experience dampened her enthusiasm for dreaming things into being. Suppose she hadn't killed Morton in her dream, she thought; would he have appeared on the doorstep the following day, with his burlap bag in hand? That wasn't a very comforting notion. She would have to be careful in future.

Her subconscious seemed to get the message. For the next little while she didn't dream at all, or if she did she remembered nothing of it. Time went by, and she determined to settle into the O'Connell house as best she could. She was assisted in this process by the arrival of a strange, tic-ridden little woman called Jarrieffa, who introduced herself as Musnakaff s second wife. She had been in service at the house, she explained, cleaning and cooking, and wished to be reemployed, happy to work in order to have a roof over her family's head. Phoebe agreed gladly, and the woman duly moved in, along with her four children, the eldest an adolescent called Enko, who was-he proudly explained-a bastard, got upon his mother by not one but two sailors (now deceased). The children's shouts and laughter quickly enlivened the house, which was big enough that Phoebe could always find a quiet spot to sit and think.

The presence of Jarrieffa and brood not only distracted her from the pain of being without Joe, it also helped to regulate the passage of time. Until their arrival Phoebe had pretty much been driven by a mixture of need and indulgence. She'd slept whenever the whim had taken her; eaten the same way. Now, the days began to recover their shape. Though the heavens still refused to offer any diumal regu@ty-Aarkening without warning, brightening just as arbitrarily-she quickly trained herself to ignore these signs. And the increasing good order of the house was echoed in the city streets when she went out walking. Restoration was underway everywhere. Houses were being rebuilt and the harbor cleared; ships were being repaired and relaunched. Plainly these people didn't have Maeve's ability to dream things into being or they wouldn't have needed to sweat so much, but they seemed happy enough in their work. A few of her neighbors got to recognize her after a while, and would greet her with a surly look when they saw her out and about.

they made no attempt to engage her in conversation, however, and her attempts to chat with them were always shortlived.

Isolation, she began to realize, could became a problem if she didn't find some way to be accepted into the community, and she started to make a list of possible ways to ease that process. A party, held in the street outside the house, perhaps? Or an invitation to the house for a few choice neighbors to whom she could tell her story.

While she was turning these options over she made a discovery that was to prove strangely influential. She found a started to sort tnrougn Lne votuiiic:n, Ltiat ti.,y dreamed up by Maeve. More likely they'd been smuggled over into the Metacosm (or carried accidentally) by fleshand-blood trespassers like herself. How else to explain the presence of a book of higher mathematics beside a treatise on the history of whaling beside a water-stained edition of the Decameron?

It was this last that most appealed to her, not for the text-which she found dry-but for the black and white etchings scattered throughout it. Two of the artists-the pictures were rendered in three distinct styles-had chosen episodes of great drama to depict, but the third was only interested in sex. His style was far from slick, but he made up for that by dint of his sheer audacity. The people in his pictures were caught in the throes of sexual frenzy, and none of them shy about it. Monks sported huge erections, peasant women lay on bales of hay with their legs in the air, a couple were fucking in mud: all in bliss.

One illustration in particular caught Phoebe's fancy. It pictured a woman kneeling in a field with her dress hitched up so that her amply endowed lover could come into her from behind. As she studied it, a ripple of pleasure passed through her, her flesh remembering what her mind had tried so hard to forget: Joe's hands, Joe's lips, Joe's body. She felt his palms against her breasts and belly; felt the pressure of his hips against her buttocks.

"Oh God... " she sighed at last, and pitched the book back into the closet, slamming the door on it.

That wasn't the end of the story however; not by a long way. When she retired a couple of hours later, the image and its consequences still lingered. She would not be able to sleep, she knew, unless she pleasured herself a little, so she lay there on her mattress-which was still where she'd first set it, in front of the window-and with her eyes on the undulating sky she played between her legs until sleep found her.

She dreamed; of a man. But this time it was not Morton.

were acute enough to make him out. was whatever visible presence he possessed-the shred of self the fire watchers had seen-Awindling still further? He feared so. If they were to see him now he doubted they'd be quite so worshipful.

Several times he decided to leave Liverpool altogether-he didn't find the sights and sounds of reconstruction comforting; they only reminded him of how removed from life he'd become-but something kept him from leaving. He tried to attach some rationale to his reluctance (he needed time to recuperate, time to plan, time to understand his condition), but none of these explanations touched the truth. Something was holding him in the city, an invisible cord around his invisible neck.

Then, one gloomy day while he was loitering down by the harbor watching the ships, he felt something tug at him.

At first, he dismissed the sensation as wish-fulrillment. But it came again, and again, and on the third try he dared allow himself a measure of excitement. This was the first time since the fire watchers he'd felt some interaction with the world outside his thoughts.

He didn't resist the summons. Up from the harbor he went, following the unspoken call.

Phoebe dreamed she was back in Dr. Powell's office, and Joe was out in the hallway, where she'd first seen him, painting the ceiling. It was raining hard. She could hear the deluge slapping against the window of the empty waiting room, and beating on the roof.

"Joe?" she said.

Her lover-to-be was perched on the top of a ladder, naked to the waist, his broad back spattered with pale green paint. Oh, but he looked so fine, with his hair cropped close to his beautiful head, and his ears jutting out, and that patch of hair at the small of his back disappearing under his belt into the crack of his ass.

"Joe?" she said, hoping she could get him to turn around. "I've got something to show you."

As she spoke she went to the low table in the middle of the waiting room and, clearing off all the dog-eared magazines with one sweep of her arm, she lay on it facing him. For some reason the rain had started to come through the ceiling, and it fell on her in sharp, straight drops. they did more than drench her; they began to wash the clothes from her body as if her blouse and dress had been painted on, the colors running off her limbs and pooling around the table, leaving her naked, which was exactly how she wanted to be.

"You can turn round now," she said to him, putting her hand down between her legs. He always liked to watch her play. "Go on," she said to him,

"turn round and look at me."

He'd passed by this house on the hill before, and wondered who lived here. He would soon find out.

He was moving down the path to the steps, up the steps to the door, through the door to the staircase. Somebody at the top of the flight was murmuring: He couldn't quite hear what. He paused a moment to listen. The speaker was a woman, he could make out that much, but he couldn't yet grasp the words, so he started to ascend.

"Joe?"

He had heard her; there was no doubt of that. He'd put down his painthrush and was wiping his hands, taking his time, knowing it only made the moment when their eyes met all the more intense if it was delayed a little.

"I've waited a long time for this... " she told him.

He didn't dare believe what he was hearing. Not the words themselves, though they were wonderful: the voice that spoke them.

Phoebe here? How was that possible? She was in Everville, the world he'd left and lost forever. Not here; not in this musty house, calling to him. That was too much to hope for.

"Oh, Joe the woman was sighing, and God in Heaven, it sounded like her, so very like her.

He went to the door, knowing whoever was speaking was on the other side of it and suddenly afraid to enter, afraid to know it wasn't her. He paused a moment, preparing himself for the pain to come, then slipped inside. The room was huge and chaotic. His gaze instantly went to the bed at the far end. It was piled high with pillows and scattered with pieces of paper, but there was nobody lying there.

Then, from the tangle of sheets on the floor, the voice, her voice, warm with welcome.

"Joe... " she said. "I've missed you so much."

He was looking at her. Finally, he was looking at her. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, descending the ladder and sauntering in from the hallway to the table where she lay, her body wet with rain.

"I'm all yours," she said.

It was her. God in Heaven, it was her! How she came to be here didn't matter. Nor did why. All that mattered was that here she was, his Phoebe, his glorious Phoebe, whose face he'd despaired of ever seeing again.

Did she know he was close?

Her eyes were shut, her pupils roving behind her lids, but he didn't doubt she was dreaming of him. There was sweat on her face, and on her legs, which were bare. He longed for the fingers to pull away the sheet that lay between; for the lips to kiss that place and the cock to pleasure it. to make again the love they'd made those afternoons in Everville, bodies intertwined as though they'd never be separated.

"Come closer," she said in her sleep.

He did so. Stood over the bottom of her bed and looked down on her. If love had weight, she'd feel it now. Or if a scent, smell it, or if a shadow, know it was cast upon her. He didn't care how she came to realize his presence, as long as somehow she did; somehow understood that after the dream of him she would find his spirit waiting close by, ready for the moment when she opened her eyes and made him real.

He was standing between her legs now, covered in paint. Flecks and splashes of it, all over his face and in his hair, on his shoulders and down over the chest. She reached up towards him.