Everville (72 page)

In dreams, and out of them, reached up...

He felt her touch. Though he had no skin, he felt the contact nevertheless, where his belly had been.

"Look at the state of you," she said, her fingers moving up from his stomach to the muscle of his chest, brushing his invisible presence, now with her fingers, now with her thumb. And wherever she'd touched him, he saw the air begin to seethe and knit, as though-dared he even hope?she was dreaming him back into being.

The paint was coming off, bit by bit. She brushed a little from his cheek and from the bridge of his nose, from his left ear, and from around his eyes. Then, though the job of paintremoval was far from finished, she went back down to his belt and unbuckled it. He smiled conspiratorially, and let her unbutton and unzip his pants, which despite their bagginess could not conceal his arousal. It seemed her finger had learned the trick of the rain, because the fabric around his groin now ran off as her dress and blouse had done, fully exposing him. He put his hands on his head, and thrust his hips forward, grinning while she ran her fingers over his cock and balls.

There were no words for this bliss, seeing his flesh knitting together as she stroked it; his balls remade unwounded, his cock as fine as she remembered it, perhaps finer.

And then-4ammit!-from somewhere in the rooms below, the sound of children shouting. Phoebe's hand stopped moving, as though the din had reached into her dream.

Children? What were children doing in the doctor's offices? Oh Lord, and here was she, stark naked. She froze, hoping they would go away, and for a few moments the hollering faded. She waited, holding her breath. Five seconds, ten seconds. Had they fled? It seemed so.

She started to reach for Joe's arm, to draw him down onto her and into her, but as she did so they began again, pounding up the stairs, shrieking in their games. He would gladly have strangled them both at that moment and there wouldn't have been a )over alive who'd have blamed him for it. But the damage was done. Phoebe's hand dropped back down onto her breast. She let out a soft, irritated moan. Then her eyes flickered open.

Oh, what a dream; and what a way to be woken from it. She'd have to tell Janieffa that in future the children Something moved in front of her, silhouetted against the window. For a heartbeat she thought it was outside-some shreds of cloth or litter, rising in a gust of dusty wind-but no. It was here, in the room with her: something ragged, retreating into the shadows.

She would have screamed, but that the thing was plainly more afraid of her than she of it. And no wonder. It was a tattered, twitching thing, wet and raw; it posed no threat.

"Whatever the fuck you are," she told it, "get the hell out of here!" She thought she heard a sound from it, but with so much noise from the kids, who were now just outside the door, she couldn't be certain.

She called "Stay out!" to them, but they either ignored her or missed the warning, because no sooner had she spoken than the door opened and in Jarrieffa's youngest pair tumbled, brawling.

"Out!" she yelled again, fearful that even if the interloper was beyond hanning them it would still give them a flight. they ceased their hullabaloo, and the littler of the two, catching sight of the thing in the shadows, began to shriek.

"It's all fight," Phoebe said, moving to usher them out of the room. As she did so the creature emerged from the murk and headed for the open door, pausing only to look in Phoebe's direction. It had eyes, she saw; human eyes attached by trailing threads of dark flesh to an ear and a piece of cheek, the air in which the fragments hung buzzing, as though it was some way of solidifying itself. Then the creature was gone, out past the panicking children into the hallway.

Phoebe heard Jarrieffa on the stairs, demanding to know what all the noise was about, but her words were cut short, and by the time Phoebe was out onto the landing the woman was clinging to the banisters sobbing with fear, watching the creature retreating down the flight. Then, recovering herself, she began up the stairs afresh, yelling for her kids.

"They're okay," Phoebe told her. "Just frightened, that's all." While Jam'effa gathered the children with her anus Phoebe went to the top of the stairs and looked down after the intruder. The front door stood open. He'd already slipped away.

"I'll fetch Enko," Jarrieffa said. "It's all right," Phoebe said. "He wasn't going to-2'

The rest of the words failed her, as halfway down the flight-halfway to closing the door to lock the creature outshe realized whose gaze she had met in that instant before the creature had fled.

"Oh God," she said.

"Enko'll shoot it," Jarrieffa was saying.

"No!" Phoebe shouted. "N@' She knew already what she'd done: half-dreamed him, then driven him away incomplete. It was unbearable. Gasping for air, she stumbled on down the stairs, and across the hallway to the front door. The sky was murky, and the ight drear, but she could see that the street was empty in both directions.

Joe had gone.

Despite the fact that Grillo's body had been identified, it seemed he had confounded any trail that might have led the authorities back to the Reef in the event of his demise. When Tesla got to the house in Omaha it was untouched. There was dust on every surface and mold on every perishable in the fridge, drifts of mail behind the front door, and a backyard so overgrown she could not see the fence.

But the Reef itself was in good working order. She sat in Grillo's stale, windowless office for a few minutes, amazed at the amount of equipment he'd managed to pile into it: six monitors, two printing machines, four fax machines, and three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, all loaded down with tapes, cassettes, and box-files of notes. In front of her the messages continued to fill up the screens as they had presumably been doing since his departure. Getting a grasp of the system, and of all the information it contained, was not going to be a simple matter. She was here for days, at least.

She headed back out to pick up a few essentials from the local market-coffee, milk, bagels, peaches, and (though she hadn't touched alcohol since her resurrection) vodka-then sorted out a few domestic details (the house was freezing, so she had to turn on the heating; and the contents of the fridge and the garbage can in the kitchen had to be dumped to clear the sickening smell) before settling down to familiarize herself with Grillo's masterwork.

She'd never been particularly adept at handling technology. It took her the best part of two, days to teach herself how to operate everything, working slowly so as not to accidentally wipe some invaluable treasure from the files. She was aided in her exploration by Grillo's handwritten notes, which were pinned, glued, and taped to both the machines and shelves. Without them, she would have despaired. Once she had a basic grasp of both the system and his methodology, she began to make her way through the files themselves. they numbered in the thousands. The names of some were self-evident-Dog-Star Saucers; Seraphic Visions; Death by Animal Ingestation-but Grillo had titled most of them for his own amusement, obliquely, and she had to call them up one by one in order to find out what they were about. There was a kind of poetry in some of the titling, along with Grillo's love of puns and a playful obscurantism. The Devouring Song, Zoological Pardons, The Fiend Venus, Neither Here nor There, Amen to That; the list went on and on.

What soon became apparent was that while Grillo had assiduously collected and collated these reports, he had not edited them. There was no distinction made within each file between a minor bizanity and something of cataclysmic scale; nor any between a lucid, measured account and a scrap of babble. Like a loving parent, unwilling to favor one child over another, Grillo had found a home for everything.

Increasingly impatient, Tesla scrolled page after page after page, still hoping for come clue to the mystery in her cells. And while she dug, the reports kept pouring in from all directions.

From Kentucky a woman who claimed she had been twice raped by "the Higher Ones," whoever they were, checked in to report that her violators were now moving south-southeast towards the state, and would be visible tomorrow dusk in the form of a yellow cloud "that will look like two angels tied back to back." From New Orleans a certain Dr. Toumier wanted to share his discovery that disease was caused by an inability to speak "with a true tongue," and that he had cured over six hundred patients thought terminal by teaching them the basic vocabulary of a language he dubbed Nazque. From her home town of Philadelphia came a piece of psychotic prose from one who signed himself (it was surely a man) the Cockatrice, warning the world that from Wednesday next he would be in glory, and only the blind would be safe For three days she remained hostage to the Reef, like an atheist locked in the Vatican library, contemptuous, repulsed even, but going back and back to the shelves, morbidly fascinated by the dogmas she found there. Even in her most frustrated moods she could not quite shake the suspicion that somewhere amid this wilderness of insanities were gems she could profit by-knowledge of the Art, knowledge of the lad-if only she could find them. But it became increasingly clear that she might very well have passed over them already, their form so garbled or their code so dense she'd failed to recognize them for what they were. At last, in the middle of the afternoon of the fifth day, she told herself: If you do this much longer you'll be as crazy as they are. Turn it off, woman. Just turn the dwnn thing off.

She flicked back to the file list, and was about to kill the machines when one of the names caught her eye.

The Ride Is Over, it read.

Perhaps she'd passed over these four words before, and not recognized them, but now they rang bells. The Ride Is Over had been the headline Grillo had wanted for his last report from Palomo Grove; he'd told her later she could use it for a screenplay if she wanted, as long as the movie was cheap and opportunistic. It was probably just a coincidence but she called up the file anyway, determined it would be the last. Her heart jumped at the words that appeared on the screen.

Tesla, Grillo had written, I hope it's you out there. But whether it is or it isn, t, I guess it doesn't matter much now, because if you're reading this-whoever you are-I'm dead.

It was the last thing she'd expected to find, but now that it was there in front of her, she wasn't so surprised. He'd known he was dying, after all, and though he'd always hated farewells, even of the casual variety, he was still a journalist to the bone. Here was his final report then: intended for a readership of one.

It's the middle of June right now, he'd written, and the last couple of weeks I've been feeling like shit. The doc says things are movingfaster than he's seen before. He wants me to go in for tests, but I told him I'd prefer to use the time working. He asked me on what, and of course I couldn't tell him about the Reef so I lied and said I was writing a book.

(It's strange. While I'm typing this I'm imagining you sitting there, Tes, reading it, hearing my voice in your head.) She could; she could hear it loud and clear.

I tried to write once, when Ifirst got the bad news. I'm not sure it was ever going to be a book, but I did try and put down a few memories, to see how they looked on the page. And you know what? they were clich@s, all of them. What I remembered was real enough-the feel of my mother's cheek, the smell of my dad's cigars; summers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; a couple of Christmases in Maine with my grandmother-but there was nothing that you couldn't find in a million autobiographies.

It didn't make the memories any less meaningful to me, but it did make the idea of writing them down redundant.

So I thought.- Okay, maybe I'll write about the things that happened in the Grove. Not just what went on at Coney Eye, but about Ellen (I think of her a lot these days) and her kid, Philip (I don't remember if you met him or not), and Fletcher in the mall But that plan went to shit just as quickly. I'd be writing away and some report would come in from Buttfuck, Ohio, about angels or UFOs or skunks speaking in tongues, and when I got back to what I'd been writing the words were like week-old cold cuts. they just lay there, stale and tasteless and gray.

I was so pissed with myself. Here was me, the wordsmith, writing about something that had actually happened in the real world, and I couldn't make it sing; not the way these crazies who were putting down whatever wild shit came into their heads could do it.

Then I began to see why Tesla leaned forward at this juncture, as if she and Grillo were debating over a couple of glasses of vodka, and now he was getting to the crux of his argument.

"Tell me, Grillo," she murmured to the screen, "tell me why."

I wouldn't let the truth go. I wanted to describe things just the way they'd happened (no, that's not right,- the way I remembered them happening), so I killed what I was doing trying to be precise, instead of letting itfly, letting it sing. Letting it be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.

What really happened in Palomo Grove doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the stories people tell about it.

I'm thinking while I'm writing this: None of it makes much sense, it's justfragments. Maybe you can connect it up for me, Tes.

That's part of it, isn't it? Connecting everything.

I know if I couldjust let my mother's skin and Christmas in Maine and Ellen and Fletcher and the talking skunks and every damn thing I everfelt or saw be part of the same story and called that story me, instead of always looking for something separate from the things I've fel@ or seen, it wouldn't matter that I was going to die soon, because I'd be part of what was going on and on. Connecting and connecting.

The way I see it now, the story doesn't give a ihit if you're real or not, alive or not. All the story wants is to be told. And I guess in the end, that's what I want too.

Will you do thatfor me, Tes?

Will you make me part of what you tell? Always?