"You were there?"
"Oh yes. I was there. And I married the child, a little later. Her name was Maeve O'Connell, and she was the most miraculous woman I ever encountered." "How so?"
"Everville was her dream, passed down to her by her father, Harmon O'Connell."
"Harmon as in Heights?"
"The same."
"Did you know him too?" "No. He was dead before I met her. She was wandering here alone, and she came where she was not welcome. It was a simple mistake."
"And just by coming here she caused a slaughter?"
"By coming here and speaking."
"Speaking? "
"There was a wedding, you see, being celebrated up there"-he pointed towards the mist-"and it was the belief in the world from which the families came that silence was sacred, because it preceded the beginning. Love was made in silence. And anyone who broke such a silence was counted the enemy,"
"So why didn't they just kill the girl?"
"Because the families were old enemies, and each thought the child was an agent of the other. As soon as she spoke, they massacred each other."
"Right here?"
"Right here," Coker said. "If we wanted to, I'm sure we could sink into the earth and find their bones."
"I'll stay where I can see the sky," Erwin said.
"it is very beautiful tonight," Coker said, throwing back his head to study the stars. "Sometimes it seems I've been alone for a hundred lifetimes, and sometimes-tonight, for instance-it's as if we only parted glances a few hours ago." He let out a strange sound, and when Erwin looked at him he saw that tears were spilling down his cheeks. "Hers were the last eyes I saw. I felt them on me, as I was dying. And I tried to hold on to life, just a while. Tried to keep looking at her, to comfort her the way she was comforting me...." He had to stop for a moment to recover himself. "But the life went out of me before it went out of her. And when I came into this"-he opened his hands in front of him@'this life after death, her body had been taken, and so had my son's."
"No wonder you hated Dolan so much."
"Oh, I hated him. But he was human. He couldn't help himself."
:'Were your people so perfect then?" Erwin said.
'There's no difference between my people and yours," Coker replied.
"Give or take a wing or a tail. We're all the same in our hearts. All sad and cruel." He paused, wiping the tears away, and as he did, glanced up the slope. "I think our friend D'Amour is having a problem," he said.
In the last few minutes, during their tearful exchange, Erwin and Coker had dropped maybe fifty yards behind D'Amour, who was within a few strides of the mist. Plainly he had sensed the enemy, because he now fell to the ground behind a boulder, and lay still. Moments later, the problem Coker had spoken of emerged from the mist in the form of not one but four individuals, each of them of competitive ugliness: one a sliver, one obese; one bovine, one bilious.
The thinnest of them was also the most eager, and came down the slope twenty yards (passing by the place where D'Amour lay) sniffing the air.
"I think maybe it's us they're after," Coker said. "What the bell are they?"
"Creatures of Quiddity," Coker replied.
"Appalling."
"I'm sure they'd say the same about you," Coker remarked. The thin creature was heading on down the incline, and it did indeed seem that he was closing on the ghosts.
"What do we do?" Erwin said. The closer the creature got the more distressing he appeared to be.
"He can't do us any harm," Coker said. "But if they see D'Amour@'
The rake-thin creature seemed to be staring right @it Erwin, which he found deeply disquieting. "It sees me," Erwin said.
"I doubt it." "It does, I tell you!"
"Well you were carping about being invisible on the way up. You can't have it-Damn!"
"What?"
"They've found him." Erwin looked past the thin man, and saw perhaps the most brutal of the creatures catching hold of D'Amour and dragging him to his feet. "This is our fault," Coker said. "I'm damn sure it's us they came looking for." Erwin was not so certain, but there was no doubt that D'Amour was in serious trouble. One of the quartet had disarmed him, another was beating him about the face. As for the creature that had come down the slope, it had turned from Erwin and Coker, and was making its way back to join its companions, who were now dragging their prisoner into the mist.
"What do we do?" Erwin said.
"We follow," Coker said. "And if they kill him we apologize."
Last time Harry had climbed the Heights, Voight's tattoos had allowed him to reach the very threshold undetected. But the trick hadn't worked this time. He didn't know why, and in truth it didn't matter. He was in the hands of his enemies-Gamaliel the stick-insect, Bartho the crucified, Mutep the runt, and Swanky the obese. There was nothing to be done about it.
He didn't attempt to resist them, in part because he knew it would only invite violence, and in part because after fill he'd come up the slope to see what the Devil looked like an theyweretakinghimtothedoorthroughwhichit-would come, so why resist?
And there was a third reason. These creatures were cousins of the demon that had taken Father Hess's life. He didn't understand the genealogy of it, but he knew by their chatter and their frenzy and their stench that they were somehow connected. Perhaps then, in the final minutes before the lad's arrival, he might learn from one or other of these horrors what the message from Lazy Susan meant.
"I ani you and you are love-"
Even at the end, was love what made the world go round?
Pr FIVE
it wasn't dark in the belly of the lad Uroboros, nor was it light. There was only an absence@f light and dark, of height and depth, of sound and texture-that might have passed for oblivion itself had Joe not been able to list all that it lacked. The oblivion, he was sure, would be a thoughtless condition.
So what was this place, and he in it? was he a ghost of some kind, haunting the Iad's head? Or a soul, trapped in the flesh of the beast, until it puked him up or pefished? He felt no threat to his existence here, but he suspected his hold on who he was would quickly become slippery. it would only be a matter of time before his thoughts lost coherence, and he forgot himself completely.
That prospect had seemed attractive enough when he'd been standing by the pool in the temple. He'd lived his life and was ready to give it up. But now, as he floated (if a thing without substance could be said to float) in the emptiness, he i wondered if perhaps his presence here had been planned or predicted by the Zehrapushu. He remembered how hungrily the first 'shu he'd encountered, on the shore outside Liverpool, had studied him. Had it, or the mind of which it was part, been sizing him up for some role in events to come, peering beyond the flesh of him to see if he'd be worth a damn in the belly of the lad?
if s@if there was indeed a purpose in his being here then it was his duty to the 'shu, whose gaze was without question one of the most wonderful experiences of his travels, to preserve whatever part of him remained-his memory, his spirit, his soul-and not succumb to forgetfulness. Name yourself, he thought. At least remember that. He had no mouth, of course, nor tongue nor lips nor lungs. All he could do was think: I am Joe Flicker. I am Joe Flicker. Doing so had an instant effect. The featureless state convulsed, and forms began to become available to his soul's senses.
He had no way of knowing his true scale here, of course. Perhaps he was tiny in this formless form-like a mote seen in a shaft of sunlight-in which case all that was congealing around him was not titanic, as it seemed, but he, its witness, a fleck. Whichever was true, he felt insignificant in the presence of these cohering shapes. He turned his sight around, and in every direction, rising to the domed darkness above him, where ragged shapes moved as though it were the breeding place for men-o'-war, down to the pit-lined with heaving abstractions-below him, was a latticework of encrusted matter.