He looked beyond them now, towards the center of the chamber. Though the filaments had lost their light, a few scraps of the misty veils that had hung from them remained. But they could not conceal the absence at the heart. The opening that had led on to Quiddity's shore was gone.
Stumbling over corpses as he went, Harry crossed to the spot, hoping with every step that his eyes deceived him. It was a vain hope. The prophet had closed the door behind him when he'd stepped away into that other place, and left nothing to mark the place.
"Stupid," Harry told himself.
He'd been so close. He'd stood on the threshold of the miraculous, where perhaps the mysteries of being might be solved, and instead of taking the opportunity while he had it, he'd let himself be distracted. He'd turned his back, and lost his opportunity.
as this the destiny Norma had spoken of? That he be left among the dead, while the miracle train moved off without him?
His legs@rained of the adrenaline that had fueled him thus far-were ready to give out. It was time to go, now; time to bury his frustration and his sorrow in sleep for a few hours. Later, maybe, when he had his thoughts in better order, he'd be able to make better sense of all this.
He made his way back across the slaughterhouse and up e stairs. As he came to the top of the flight, however, someing lurched out of the shadows to block his path. The phet's massacre had not been completely thorough, it appeared. Here was one who'd survived, though even in the paltry light of the passageway it was plain she could not be far from death. She wore a wound from the middle of her chest to her hip, its length gummy with dried blood. Her face was as flat as an iron, her eyes gleaming gold in her noseless, lipless face.
"I know you," she said, her voice low and sibilant. "You were at the ceremony."
"Yes I was."
"Why did you come back?"
"I wanted to get through the door."
"So did we all," she said, leaning in Harry's direction. Her eyes shone and fluttered eerily, as if she were reading his marrow. "You're not one of us," she said.
Harry saw no reason to lie. "No, I'm not."
"You cw-ne with him," %he suddenly said. "Oh by the'shu... She flung herself back away from Harry, raising her arms to protect her face.
"It's all right," Harry said. "I wasn't with him. I swear."
He came up the last few steps and started towards her. Too weak to outrun him, the creature sank down against the wall, her broken body wracked with sobs. "Kill me," she said. "I don't care. There's nothing left."
Harry went down on his haunches in front of her. "Listen to me, will you? I didn't come with whoever it was-"
"Kissoon," she said.
"What?" She peered at him through her webbed fingers. "You do know him."
"The Kissoon I know's dead," he said. "Or at least I thought he was."
"He murdered our Blessedm'n and came in to our ceremonies wearing his flesh. And why?"
Harry had an answer to that, at least. "to get into Quiddity."
The creature shook her head. "He didn't leave," she said. "He just sealed the door."
"Are you sure?"
"I saw it with my own eyes. That's how I know it was Kissoon."
:'Explain that."
'When it closed, at the very last moment, there was a light went through everything-the brick, the flow, the dead-and I seemed to see their true nature, just for a little time. And I looked up at him-at the man we'd thought was our Blessedm'n-and I saw another man hidden in his flesh."
"How did you know it was Kissoon?"
"He had tried to join us, once. Said he was an exile, like us, and he wanted to come home with us, back to Quiddity." When she said the word, she shuddered, and more tears came down. "You know what's strange?" she said with a sour little laugh. "I was never there. Most of us were never there. We're the children of exiles, or their children's children. We lived and died for something we only ever knew in stories."
"Do you know where he went9"
"Kissoon?"
Harry nodded.
"Yes, I know. I went after him, to his hiding place."
"You wanted to kill him?"
"Of course. But once I got there I had no strength left. I knew if I faced him like this, he'd finish me. I came back here to prepare myself."
"Tell me where he is. Let me do the job for you."
"You don't know what he can do." "I've heard," Harry replied. "Believe me. I've heard."
"And you think you can kill him?"
"I don't know," Harry said, picturing in his mind's eye the portrait Ted had produced. The heavens livid, the street reeling, and a black snake under his pointed heel. Kissoon was that snake, by another name. "I've beaten some demons in my time."
"He's not a demon," the creature said. "He's a man."
"Is that good news or bad?"
The creature eyed him gravely. "You know the answer to that," she said. Bad, of course, Demons were simple. they believed in prayer and the potency of holy water, Thus they fled from both. But men- what did men believe?
iv The address the creature had given him was up in morningside Heights, around I 10th and Eighth Avenue: an undistinguished house in need of some cosmetic repair. There were no drapes at the lower windows. Harry peered inside. The room was empty: no pictures on the walls, no carpets on the floor, no furniture, nothing. He knew before he'd reached the front door, and found it an inch ajar, and stepped through it into the gray interior, that he'd come too late. The house was empty, or nearly so.
A few signs of Kissoon's occupancy remained. At the top of the stairs, lying in a pool of its own degenerating matter, was a modestly sized Lix. It raised its head at Harry's approach, but with its maker departed, it had lost what tiny wits it had, overreached itself, and slid down the stairs, depositing cobs of sewerage on each step as it descended. Harry followed the fetid trail it had left to the room that Kissoon had lately occupied. It resembled a derelict's hideaway. Newspapers laid in lieu of carpets; a filthy mattress under the grimy window; a heap of discarded cans and plates of rotted food, alongside a second pile, this of liquor bottles. In short, a squalid pit.
There was only one piece of evidence to mark the ambition of the man who had shit and sweated here. On the wall behind the door, a map of the continental United States, upon which Kissoon had inscribed all manner of marks and notations. Harry pulled the map off the wall and took it to the window to study. The man's hand was crabbed, and much of the vocabulary foreign to Harry's eye, like a mismatched marriage of Latin and Russian, but it was plain that over a dozen sites around the country had been of significance to Kissoon. New York City and its environs had attracted the densest concentration of marginalia, with a region in the southwest corner of North Dakota, and another in Arizona, of no little interest to him. Harry folded up the map and pocketed it. Then he made a quick but efficient search of the rest of the room, in the hope of turning up further clues to Kissoon's purpose and methodology. He found nothing of interest, however, excepting a pack of bizarre playing cards, plainly hand-made and much used. He flicked through them. There were perhaps twenty cards, each marked with a simple design: a circle, a fish, a hand, a window, an eye. These he also pocketed, as much for the taking as the wanting, and having done so slipped away past the decayed Lix and out into the warm, pale air.