It was a century and a half since he'd sown the seed that had become Everville; a century and a half in which he had sown many such seeds in hope of apotheosis. Lonely and frustrating years, most of them, wandering from state to state, always a visitor, always an outsider. Of course there were advantages to his condition: not least a useful detachment from the crimes and torments and tragedies that had so quickly soured the pioneers' dream of Eden. There was little left, even in a town like Everville, of the fierce, pure vision of those souls with whom he'd mingled in Independence, Missouri. It had been a vision fueled by desperation, and nourished by ignorance, but whatever its frailties and its absurdities, it had moved him, after its fashion. It moved him still, in memory.
There had been something to die for in those hard hearts, and that was a greater gift than those blessed with it knew; a gift not granted those who'd come after. they were a prosaic lot, in Owen's estimations, the builders of suburbs and the founders of committees: men and women who had lost all sense of the tender, terrible holiness of things.
There were always exceptions, of course, like the kid lying asleep in the bed behind him. He and little Maeve O'Connell would have understood each other very well, Owen suspected. And after years of honing his instincts he was usually able to find one such as Seth within a few hours of coming to a new town. Every community had one or two youths who saw visions or heard hammerings or spoke in tongues. Regrettably, many of them had taken refuge in addiction, he found, particularly in the larger cities. He discovered them on seedy street corners dealing drugs with one eye on Heaven, and gently escorted them away to a room like this (how many like this had he been in? tens of thousands) where they would trade visions for sodomy, back and forth.
"Owen?"
The boy's hair was spread on the pillow as though he were floating.
"Good morning," Owen had replied.
"Are you going to come back to bed?"
"What time is it?"
"Just before seven," Seth had said. "We don't have to et up yet." He stretched, sliding down the bed as he did so.
Owen looked at the spiral of hair beneath the boy's arms and wondered at the workings of desire. "I have to go exploring today," he'd replied.
"Do you want to come with me?"
"It depends what you're going to explore," Seth said, shamelessly fingering himself beneath the sheet.
Owen smiled, and crossed to the bottom of the bed. The youth had turned from waif to coquette in the space of one night. He was Lifting the sheet up between his knees now, just high enough to give Owen a glimpse of his butthole.
"I suppose we could stay here an hour or so," Owen conceded, slipping the belt of his robe so that the boy could see what trouble he was inviting. Seth had flushed-his face, neck, and chest reddening in two heartbeats.
"I had a dream about that," he said.
"Liar."
"I did," Seth protested.
The sheet was still tented over his raised knees. Owen made no attempt to pull it off, but simply knelt between Seth's feet, and stared down at him, his prick peeping out from his robe.
"Tell me-" he said.
"Tell you what?"
"What you dreamed." Seth looked a little uncomfortable now. "Go on," Owen said, "or I'm going to cover it up again."
"Well," said Seth, "I dreamed@h Jeez, this sounds so dumb-"
"Spit it out."
"I dreamed that," he pointed to Owen's dick "was a hammer."
"A hammer?" "Yeah. I dreamed it was separate from you, you know, and I had it in my hand, and it was a hammer."
Odd as the image was, it didn't strike Owen as utterly outlandish, given the conversation they'd had on the street the night before. But there was more.
"I was using it to build a house."
"Are you making this up?"
"No. I swear. I was up on the roof of this house, it was just a wooden fratne but it was a big house, somewhere up on the mountain, and there were nails that were like little spikes of fire, and your dick-" He half sat up and reached to touch the head of Owen's hard-on "your dick was driving the nails in. Helping me build my house." He looked up at Owen's face, and shrugged. "I said it was dumb."
"Where was the rest of me?" Owen wanted to know.
"I don't remember," Seth said.
"Huh.
"Don't be pissed off."
"I'm not pissed off."
"It was just a dumb dream. I was thinking about hammering and@an we stop talking about it now?" He slid his hand around Owen's sex, which had lost size and solidity while its dream-self was discussed, and attempted to stroke it back to its previous state. But it wouldn't be coaxed, much to Seth's disappointment.
"We'll have some time this afternoon," Owen said to him.
,,Okay," said Seth, dropping back onto the bed and snatching the sheet off his lower torso. "But this is going to make walking around a little uncomfortable."
Owen gazed at the nearly hairless groin before him with a vague sense of unease. Not at the sight itself-the boy's equipment was pretty in its lopsided way-but at the thought of his manhood being used to hammer in spikes of fire, while the rest of him went unremembered.
Most of the time, of course, dreams were worthless. Bubbles in the stew of a sleeping mind, bursting once they surfaced. But sometimes they were revelations about the past; sometimes prophecies, sometimes ways to shape the present. And sometimes@h, this was rare, but he'd known it happen-they were signs that the promise of the Art was not a hollow promise; that the human mind could know the past, present, and future as one eternal moment. He didn't believe that Seth's dream of house and hammer fell into this category, but something about it made his palms clammy and his nape itch. There was meaning here, if he could only decode it. "What are you thinking?"
Seth was looking up at him with a troubled expression on his long, pale face.
"Crossroads," Owen replied.
"What about them?"
"That's what we're going to look for this morning." He got off the bed, and went through to the bathroom to piss. "I want to find the first crossroads in the city."
"Why?" Seth wanted to know.
He contemplated lying to the boy, but why? The answer was a paradox anyway.
'Because my journey ends where the roads cross," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means-I'm not going to be here for very much longer," Owen said, addressing Seth from the bathroom door, so we may as well enjoy ourselves."
The boy looked downcast. "What will I do when you've gone?" he said. Owen ruminated for a moment. Then he said, "Build a. house, maybe?"
Tesia got lost just north of Salem, and had traveled thirty-five miles along the Willamina road before she realized her error and turned round. By the time she reached the Everville city limits it was past one, and she was hungry. She drove around for ten minutes, orienting herself while she looked for a suitable eatery, and eventually settled on a place called Kitty's Diner. It was busy, and she was politely told there'd be a ten-minute wait.
"No problem," she said, and went to sit out in the sun. There was plenty to divert her while she waited. The diner was situated at the intersection of the city's Main Street and a second, equally bustling thoroughfare. People and vehicles flowed by ceaselessly in both directions.
"This place is busy," she thought.
There's some kind offestival going on, Raul replied.