Everville (70 page)

"Look at you," he said, as Maeve approached the door.

"Clayton?" she said, halting to study him.

"How sick you look," the sight of her frailty apparently giving him courage. He stepped inside. "You should be dead, Mama," he said.

"So should you."

"Oh," he cooed, "I am, Mama. All that's left alive is the hate in me." He was picking up his speed, raising his left hand as he closed on her. In it, the rod he'd wielded twice before, the murderous rod.

Yelling a warning, Harry raced to intercept the blow, but Kissoon was too quick. He struck his mother's head with the rod, and down she went, an arc of blood splashing on the carpeted ground.

In the bright grave below, Tesla felt the murder like a second death. Her spirit shaken, she looked up to see a stain spreading across her sky, while a woman's voice unleashed a sob of agony....

Harry caught hold of Kissoon's arm, and @ to pull him away from his mother, but the man was too strong. With a simple shrug he flung Harry off him, sending him stumbling through the gossamer walls to land on his back beneath the kitchen table. As he got to his feet he saw Raul throw himself upon Mssoon, but his assault was of such little consequence Kissoon didn't bother to dislodge his attacker. He simply fell to his knees beside Maeve, his rod raised to finish his matricide. Once, twice, three, four times the weapon fell, the house shaking with each blow as the mind that had conjured it was snuffed out By the time Harry reached Kissoon it was over. Spattered with Maeve's blood, his eyes spilling tears, he hauled himself to his feet. He wiped his nose like any backstreet thug, and said to Harry, "Thank you. I enjoyed that."

Tesla didn't want to hear. Didn't want to move. Didn't want anything but to float here as long as this limbo would have her.

But the cruelty came down from above, loud and clear, and try as she might she couldn't keep the anger from burgeoning in her. Her agitation informed the ground around her, and its motion drove her back towards her floating body. The closer she came to it the more frenzied the energies surrounding her became. they were eager for this reunion, she realized; they wanted her returned into her flesh.

And why? She had the answer the moment she slid back into the space behind her eyes. It wanted to make her heart leap. It wanted to make her lungs draw breath. And most of all, it wanted to come into her living body, and let that body be the crux of all that flowed here. A place where the mind could make sense of the flesh's confusions. A place where beasts and divinities could be dissolved, and get about the work of oneness.

In short, it wanted to give her the Art.

And there was no refusing it. She knew the moment it passed into her that the gift was also a possession. That she would be changed in ways that were presently unimaginable to her, changes that made the difference between life and death look like a nuance.

There was perhaps a moment between the first heartbeat and the second, when she might have rejected the gift, and fled her body. Let it die again, and wither. But before she quite realized the choice was hers, she'd chosen.

And the Art had her.

"What is this?" Kissoon said, watching as the ground on which his mother's body lay was pierced and a thousand pinprick shafts of light broke from it.

Harry had no answers. All he could do was watch while the spectacle escalated, the old woman's corpse withering where it lay, as if the light-which gave off no discernible heat-was cremating it. If so, it was as adept a creator as destroyer, for even as Maeve O'Connell's corpse went to ash, another form, another woman, was resurrected in the midst of her pyre.

"Tesla?"

She looked like a tapestry sewn from fire, but it was her. God in Heaven, it was her!

Harry heard the drone of the lad in his skull turn to the lowing of a fretful animal. Vissoon was retreating towards the front door, clearly as spooked as his faceless ally, but before he could reach the threshold Tesla called to him by name. Her voice was no more mellifluous for her transfiguration.

"This is unforgivable," she said, the fire threads embers. now; her body almost her own. "Here, of all places, where both of us were born.11

"Both of us?" said Kissoon. "I am born here and now," she said. "And you are a witness to that, which is no little honor."

The troubled din of the lad was continuing to escalate through this exchange, and now, staring past Kissoon into the darkness beyond the faltering walls, Harry saw its abstractions unknitting, its wheel fragmenting.

"Are you doing that?" Harry said to'Tesia.

"Maybe," she said, looking down at her body, which was more solid by the moment. She seemed particularly interested in her hands. It took Harry only an instant to work out why. She was remembering the Jaff, whose hands had blazed with the Art. Blazed, then broken.

"Buddenbaum was right," Harry said.

"About what?"

"You and the all."

"I didn't plan it this way," she said, her tone a mingling of puzzlement and distress. "If he hadn't shed blow-"

She looked up from her hands, back at Kissoon, who lead retreated to the place where the door had once stood. its conjured memory was barely visible now. As for the lad, its lornis turned in the air behind him, drawing the darkness into their loops as they circled, sealing themselves in shadow. Soon, they were just places where the stars failed to shine. Then not even that.

"This is the beginning of the end," Kissoon said,

"I know," Tesia replied, with a ghost of a smile on her I'-,ice,

"You should be afraid," Kissoon told her.

"Why? Because you're a man capable of killing his own mother?" She shook her head. "The world's been full of scum like you from the beginning," she said quietly. "And if the end means there's no more to come, then that's not going to be much of a loss, is it?"

He stared at her for a few seconds, as if searching for some riposte. Finding none, he simply said, "We'll see... " and turning into the same darkness that had taken the Iad, he was gone. There was another silence then, longer than the one before, while the walls of the whorehouse grew ever more insubstantial. Harry went down on his haunches, his eyes pricking with tears of relief, while the last dreg of the lad's drone faded and disappeared from the bones of his head. Tesia, meanwhile, wandered a few yards from the place where she'd appeared-which now looked like any other spot in the street-and stared towards the fires. There were sirens whooping in the distance. The saviors were on their way with hoses, lights, and words of reason.

"How does it feel?" Harry asked her. "I'm... trying to pretend nothing's happened to me," Tesla replied, her voice a gravelly whisper.

"If I take it slowly... very slowly... maybe I won't get crazy."

"So it's not like they say-?"

"I can't see the past, if that's what you mean."

"What about the future?"

"Not from where I'm standing." She drew a deep breath. "We haven't told that story yet. That's why." There was a peal of laughter from the direction of the garden. "Your friend sounds happy," she said.

"That's Raul."

"Raul?" A tentative smile appeared on Tesla's face. "That's Raul? Oh my Lord, I thought I'd lost him...." She faltered, as her gaze found Raul, standing among the last of the blossoming trees. "Look at that," she said.

"What?" said Harry.

"Oh, of course," she said, "I'm seeing with death's eyes." She pondered for a moment. "I wonder... ?" she said finally, raising her hand in front of her, index and middle fingers extended. "Do you want to try something?"

Harry got to his feet. "Sure."

"Come here."

He came to her, a little trepidatiously. "I don't know if this is going to work or not," she warned. "But who knows, maybe we'll get lucky."

She laid her fingers lightly against his jugular. "Do you feel anything?" she said.

"You're cold."

"That's all, huh? Okay, let's try... here." This time, she touched his forehead. "Still cold?" she said. He didn't reply. Just winced a little. "You want me to stop?"

"No," he said. "No, it's... just... strange-"

"Take another look at Raul," she said.

He turned his eyes in the direction of the trees and a gasp of delight escaped him.

"You can see them?" "Yes," he smiled. "I can see them."

Raul was not in the fading garden alone. Maeve was standing close by him, no longer wrapped in drear and mist but clothed in a long, pale dress. The years had fallen from her. She was in her prime; a handsome woman of forty or so, standing arm in arm with a man who surely had lion in his lineage. He too was dressed for a summer evening, and gazed upon his wife as though this was the first hour of their courtship, and he hopelessly in love.

There was a fourth member of this unlikely group. Another phantom-Erwin Toothaker, Harry supposeddressed in a shapeless jacket and baggy pants, watching from a little distance as the lovers exchanged their tender glances. "Shall we join them?" Tesia said. "We've got a few minutes before people start to come sightseeing."

"What happens when they do?"

"We won't be here," Tesla replied. "It's time for us all to put our lives in order, Harry, whether we're dead, living, or something else entirely. It's time to make our peace with things, so we're ready for whatever happens next," she said.

"And you don't know what that'll be?"

"I know what it won't be," she said, leading the way into the garden.

. "And what's that?" he asked, following her through a spiraling shower of petals.

"Like anything we've ever dreamed."

Everville's weekend of portents and manifestations did not go unnoticed. In the days immediately following the events of Festival Saturday and Sunday morning the city came under the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for communities that have produced mass murderers or presidential candidates. Something of strange consequence had happened there, nobody contested that. But nor could anybody quite decide what, not even those who'd been in the thick of it. In fact the people who should in principle have been the most reliable witnesses (those who'd been at the crossroads on Saturday afternoon; those trapped in the Town Hall around two on Sunday morning) were in one sense the least useful. Not only did they contradict one another, they contradicted themselves from hour to hour, recollection to recollection, their talk of quakes and fires and rock falls mingled with details so farfetched as to turn the story into tabloid fodder within a week.

No sooner had these details found pfint-along with the inevitable comparisons to other sites of outlandish bloodshed like Jonestown and Waco-than the city came under scrutiny from a very different selection of examiners-psychics, UFO-ologists, and New Age apocalyptics-their vocal presence further damaging the legitimacy of the story. Television coverage that had been sympathetic on Tuesday was getting wary or even cynical by the end of the week. Time magazine @CP ".." -I pulled a cover piece on the tragedy before it reached the presses, replacing it with a story inside that implied the whole event had been a publicity stunt that had spiraled out of control. The piece was accompanied by an unfortunate, and deeply unflattering, portrait of Dorothy Bullard, who'd been persuaded to be photographed in her nightgown, and was immortalized standing behind her screendoor looking like a lost soul under home arrest. The piece was entitled: Is America Losing Its Mind?

There was no denying that people had perished the previous weekend, of course, many of them horribly. The body count finally reached twenty-seven, including the manager of the Sturgis Motel and the three bodies discovered on the road outside the city, two of them burned beyond recognition, the third that of a sometime-journalist called Nathan Grillo. There were autopsies; there were overt and covert investigations by the police and FBI; there were public pronouncements as to the various causes of death. And of course there was gossip, some of which made it into the tabloids, much of which did not. The story that two skins made of some imitative alien substance were found at the motel did make the pages of the Enquirer. The rumor that three crosses had been found close to the summit of Harmon's Heights, with bodies crucified on two of them and a body of some unearthly creature slumped at the foot of the third did not.

In the second week of reporting, with the 100nier OPiners and witnesses ever more voluble, and the Time interpretation of events gaining adherents daily, the story took on a new lease of life with the suicide of one of Everville's most beloved citizens: Bosley Cowhick.

He was found in the kitchen of his diner at six-fifteen on Wednesday morning, a week and three days after Festival Weekend. He had shot himself, leaving, beside the cash register, a note, the contents of which were leaked to the press the following day, despite Jed Gilholly's best efforts to keep Bosley's last words under wraps. The note bore no address. There were just a few rambling and ill-punctuated lines scrawled on the back of a menu.

I hope the Lord willforgive mefor what I'm doing, he'd written, but I can't go on living any more with all these things in my head. I know people are saying I'm crazy, but I saw what I saw and maybe I did wrong, but I did it for the sake of the baby. Seth Lundy knows that's true. He saw it too and he knows I had no choice, but I keep thinking that God put her into my hands to test me and I was not strong enough to do His will even if I did itfor the best. I don't want to live any more thinking about it all the time. I have faith that the Lord will understand and be with me because He made me and He knows that I have always tried to do His will. Just sometimes it's too much. I'm sorry for hurting anybody. Goodbye.

Inevitably, the mention of Seth Lundy in this pitiful mi'ssive set a whole new trail of inquiries in motion, as Lundy was one of the people who was listed as missing after the weekend. Bill Waits admitted witnessing the Lundy boy being assaulted by two of his fellow musicians, but that story remained uncor-roborated. One of those two men, Larry Glodoski, was dead under highly suspicious circumstances, while the other, Ray Alstead, was in custody in Salem, suspected of his murder. He was being kept sedated, to minimize his eruptions of violence, which seemed to be associated with a fear that the deceased would he coming to find him because he'd seen more than he was supposed to see. Quite what he'd witnessed he would not say, but his obsession with the vengeful dead strengthened the belief among the police psychiatrists that he might well have been responsible for a number of the slaughters that night. He had gone on a rampage, the theory went, and was now in terror that his victims would come to claim him. Waits explicitly denied this-he'd been with Alstead most of the evening, he pointed out-but he'd also been in a highly intoxicated state for much of that time so he was not the most reliable of witnesses.

Now, with the death of Bosley Cowhick, the authorities lost a potentially useful witness and were left with another collection of puzzles. What had happened to Seth Lundy? Who exactly was this child that the God-fearing Bosley had felt so guilty for relinquishing? And, if the baby had even existed, to whom had he relinquished her?

There were no answers to any of these questions forthcoming in the short term. Bosley Cowhick was buried in the Potter Cemetery, alongside his mother, father, and maternal grandmother; Ray Alstead remained in a cell in Salem, while his lawyer fought to have him released on grounds of insufficient evidence; and as nobody came forward to report a missing baby, the child remained unidentified. As for the disappearance of Seth Lundy, it opened up what was in a sense to be the last of the Everville Mysteries to reach the eyes and cars of the genera) public, and that surrounded the figure of Owen Buddenbaum. Unlike the baby, nobody doubted Buddenbaum's existence. He'd been seen failing from a window, he'd been examined at Silverton Hospital, he'd been in the midst of events on the afternoon of Festival Saturday, which had ended in such turmoil, and he had still been in the city after nightfall, his presence noted and reported by several people. Indeed, he seemed to have been a constant factor in the weekend's events, so much so that in some quarters he was suggested to have been at the center of the whole cycle of events: the grand master, lording it over what was either a misbegotten hoax, a paranormat phenomenon, or a case of mass hysteria, depending on your point of view. If he could be found, it was widely believed, and persuaded to speak, he would be able to solve most, if not all, the unanswered questions. - A passable artist's likeness was made and appeared in several national magazines, as well as in both the Oregonian and the Everville Register. Almost immediately, the reports began to come back in. He had been seen in Louisiana two years before; he'd been sculling around a pool in Miami, just last week; he'd been spotted at Disneyland, moving through the crowd watching the Electric Parade, There were literally dozens of such sightings, some of them going back more than a decade, but even when the witness had had occasion to interact with the mysterious Mr, Buddenbaum there was little hard evidence about him. He certainly didn't speak of miracles or Mars or the secret workings of the world. He came and went, leaving behind him the vague sense of somebody who didn't belong in this day and age.

These reports, numerous though they were, were not weird enough to keep Everville's story in the public eye. Once all the funerals were over, and the photographers had been up Harmon's Heights to see the summit

(which had been so thoroughly scoured by the authorities 4here was nothing left to photograph but the view); once the Bosley Cowhii suicide had been recounted, and the Owen ]3uddenbau sightings run, the tale of Everville ran out of fuel. By the end of September it was state, and a month lat it was the stuff of Halloween tales, or forgotten, I am born here and now, Testa had said to Kissoon as she' stood in the dwindling remains of Maeve O'Connell's houst and that had been the truth. The very ground which she' assumed would be her grave had proved to be a womb, an she'd risen from it remade. Little wonder then that the wee that followed resembled a second childhood, far strang than her first.

As she'd told D'Amour, she felt little sense of reve) tion. The gift that she'd inadvertently received, or-and s did not discount this possibility-unconsciously purvu had not given her any great insights into the structure of rea itY. Or if it had she was not yet resilient enough to open he self up to their presence. Even the minor miracle she'

worked in the whorehouse that night-allowing Harry to s with the eyes of the dead-now seemed foolhardy. Sh would not be tempted to 90 around bestowing such visio on people again; not until she was certain she had control what she was doing, and that certainty, she suspected, wou) he a long time coming. Her mind felt more closed down no than it had before her resurrection, as though she had instin tively narrowed her field Of vision when the prospect of in nite horizons loomed for fear her thoughts would take flig and she would lose her grip on who she was completely.

Now she was back in her old apartment in We Hollywood, where she had headed immediately after lea ing Everville, not because she'd ever felt ecstaticall happy there-she hadn't-but because she needed th comfort of the familiar. Many of the neighbors' faces ha changed, but the comedies and dramas that surrounded he were essentially the same after five years. Every Saturda night the pre-op transsexual in the apartment below would get maudlin and play torch songs until four in the momin at least twice a week the couple in the next building would have screaming matches ending in verbally explicit reconciliations; every day somebody's cat was sick on the stairs. It was less than glamorous, but it was home, and there in that cramped apartment with its cheap furniture and its cracked plaster walls she could pretend, at least for a time, that she was a normal woman living a normal life. Not perhaps the kind of normality Middle America would have recognized, but a reasonable approximation. She'd nurtured her hopes here and wasted time she could have used realizing them. She'd tended her wounded ego when a piece of work had been rejected. Tended it too when love had dealt her a blow. When she'd caught Claus cheating; when Jerry had left for Miami and never come back. Hard times, some of them. But the memories helped remind her of who she was, scars and all. Right now that was more important than the pleasures of self-deception.

Of course this was also the apartment where Mary Muralles had perished in the coils of Kissoon's Lix, and where she and Lucien-poor, guiltless Lucien-had talked about how people were vessels for the infinite. It was a phrase she had never forgotten. She might have thought it a kind of prophecy had she not believed what she'd told D'Amour: that the future always remained untold and thus untenable. Prophecy or no, the fact remained that she had become a kind of vessel for what had always been touted as an infinite power. Now she had it, she was determined not to be destroyed by it. She would learn to use the Art as Tesia Bombeck, or let it lie fallow inside her.

Once in a while during this period of restoration she would get a call from Harry in New York, checking in to see that all was well. He was sweetly considerate of her tender condition, and their exchanges were for the most part determinedly banal. they never quite stooped to talking politics, but he kept his side of the conversation light and general, waiting for her to deepen the exchange if she felt resilient enough. she seldom did. Most of the time they chatted about nothing in particular and left it at that. But as the weeks went by she started to feel more confident of her strength, and dared to talk, albeit tentatively, of what had happened in Everville, and its long-term consequences. Had he heard anything of the IL

whereabouts of the lad, for instance? Or of Kissoon? (Me answer to both these questions was no.) What about TommyRay, or Little Amy?

(Again, the answer was no.)

"Everybody's keeping their heads down's my guess,"

Harry said. "Licking their wounds. Waiting to see who moves first."

"You don't sound all that bothered," Tesia said.

"You know what? I think Maeve had it fight. She said to me: If you don't know what's ahead of you, why be scared of it? There's a lot of sense in that."

"There's also a lot of people gone, Harry, who had good reason to be scared,"

"I know. I'm not trying to pretend it's all sunshine and flowers. It isn't and I know it isn't. But I've spent so much of my life looking for the Enemy@'

"And now you've seen it."

"Now I've seen it."

"And it sounds like you're smiling."

"I am. Shit, I don't even know why, but I am, I'm smiling. You know, Grillo used to tell me I was being simpleminded about all this shit, and we kinda fell out about it, but I hope to God he's hearing me, because he was right, Tes. He was right."

The conversation more or less petered out there, but Harry's mention of Grillo started her thinking of him, and once she'd begun there was no stopping. Until now she'd actively feared the thought of dealing with her feelings for him, certain she risked her hard-won self-possession if she was drawn into those troubled waters. But caught off-guard like this, obliged to let the memories snoWhall or be mowed down trying to halt them, she surrendered herself, and after all her trepidation, it was not so bad. In fact it was rather comforting, bringing him to mind. He'd changed radically in the eight years she'd known him: lost most of his idealism and all of his certainties and gained an obsession in their place. But under his increasingly prickly exterior, the man she had first met@harming, childish, irascible-remained visible, at least to her. they had never been lovers, and once in a while she'd regretted the fact. But there had never been a man in her life so constant as Grillo, or in the end so unalloyed in his affections. Even in more recent times, when she'd been traveling, and sometimes months would go by without their speaking, it had never taken more than a sentence or two between them before they were talking as though minutes had passed since their last exchange. Recalling those long-distance conversations from truckstop diners and backroad gas stations, her thoughts turned to the labor that had consumed Grillo in the half-decade since Palomo Grove: the Reef. He had described it to her more than once as the work which he'd been put on the planet to perform, and though it demanded more energies and more patience than he had sometimes feared he was capable of supplying, he had kept faith with it, as far as she knew, to the end.