"Doesn't take much, does it?" the man said to Harry, his voice a nasal whine. "One rope and you're reduced to an animal." He worked at the knot with the blade, his back to the crack. "What's going on over there?" he wanted to know.
"I can't make out." The rope was cut, and fell away. "Thank you," D'Amour said. "I don't know why-"
"It's me, Harry. It's Raul." "Raul?"
The round face beamed. "I finally got a body of my own," he said.
"Well, not quite. There's something else in here with me, but it's virtually cretinous."
"What happened to Tesla?"
"I was separated from her, at the threshold. The power there, it's overwhelming. It pulled me out of her head."
"And where is she now?"
"She went to look for Grillo, I think," Raul said. "I'm going to go look for her, before it's all over. I want to make my farewells. What about you?"
Harry's gaze went back to the maelstrom around the door. "When the lad comes-" Raul said.
"I know. It'll take hold of my head and fill it with shit." There were already signs of the lad's proximity in the air. Harry's eyes were stinging, his head whining, his teeth aching. "Is it the Devil, Raul?"
"If you want it to be," Raul replied.
Harry nodded. It was as good an answer as any.
"You're not coming then?" Raul said.
"No," Harry replied. "I came up here to see what the Enemy looks like and that's what I'm going to do."
"Men I'll wish you lucV,,, Raul said, as another wave of shudders Passed through the ground. "I'm out of here, D'Amour!" With that, he turned and stumbled away between the crosses, leaving Harry to continue his interrupted ascent. There were fissures gaping in the ground around him, the widest of them a yard across, and growing. A viscous mess of liquefied earth was rolling down from the area around the crevices, and running off into them.
And beyond it, the neirica itself, which was now fully thirty yards wide, offering Harry a substantial view of the shore. It was no longer the seductive place he'd glimpsed from the chambers of the Zyem Carasophia. The lad's titanic form blocked out the dream-sea, and the shore itself was a rising hail of rock and dirt. It didn't block the lad's influence upon his mind, however. He felt a wave of intense selfrevulsion taint his thoughts. It was a sickness in him, the taint told him, wanting to see this abomination face to face: a disease from which he would deservedly die, He tried to shake the poison from his head, but it wouldn't go. He stumbled on with images of death filling his mind's eye: Ted Dusseldorf's body on a gurney, covered by a sheet; the mangled flesh of the Zyem Carasophia, sprawled around their chamber; Maria Nazareno's corpse, slumped in front of a candle flame. He heard them sobbing all around him, the dead, demanding explanation.
"You never did understand." He looked off to his right, and there, wedged in a fissure, his arms trapped at his sides, was Father Hess. He was wearing the wound Lazy Susan had given him all those years ago, and they were as fresh as if he'd just received them.
"I'm not here to accuse you, Harry," he said. "You're not here, period," Harry said.
"Oh come on, Harry," Hess said, "since when did that matter?" He grinned. "It's not reality that causes the trouble, Harry. It's illusions. You should have learned that by now."
That was all this was, Harry knew: an illusion. He was conjuring it up. Every word, every drop of blood. So why couldn't he just tear his eyes from it and move on? "Because you loved me," Hess said, as though Harry had asked the question aloud. "I was a good man, a loving man, but when it came down to it you couldn't save me." He coughed, bringing up a gruel of bilious water. "That must have been terrible," he said. "to be so powerless." It stared at Harry pityingly. "The truth is, you still are," he said. "Still looking to see the Enemy clearly, just once, just once."
"Are you finished?" Harry said.
"A little closer@' Hess begged.
"What?" "Closer, I said." Harry approached the martyr. "That's better," Hess said. "I don't want this spread around." He dropped his voice to a growl. "It's all done with mirrors," he said, and suddenly his arms sprang from the fissure and seized hold of Harry's lapels. Harry wrestled to escape the illusion's grip, but it dragged him down, inch by inch, and as it did so the flesh of its face seemed to slide away in ribbons. There was no bone beneath. Just a brownish pulp.
"See?" it said, its mouth a lipless hole. "Mirror-men. Both of us."
"Fuck you!" Harry yelled, and pulling himself free of Hess's grip he stumbled backwards.
Hess shrugged and grinned. "You never did understand," he said again.
"I told you over and over and over and over-"
Harry turned his back on the pulpy face.
"And over and over-"
And looked back towards the door. He had a second, perhaps two, to realize that the lad, or some part of it, was no longer in that world but this. Then the ground around the Uroboros rose up in a solid wall and all that had gone before-the din, the tremors, the revulsion-seemed like a dream of perfect peace.
It was the ride of Phoebe's life: cocooned in a stony womb, and carried in the grip of the rock as it rose to block the lad's way. Texas had promised she'd be safe, and safe she was, her capsule home through the convulsing ground and up on fountains of liquid rock with such ease she could have threaded a needle had she wished to take her eyes off the sight he was showing her. The rock was a protean face, shaped and driven by his will. One moment she was plunged into grottoes where the Quiddity ran in icy darkness, the next the strata were dividing before her life so many veils, the next she seemed to he in the midst of a vital body, with liquid rock blazing in its veins, and the King's fossil heart beating like thunder all around.
Sometimes she heard his voice in the walls of her womb, telling her not to be afraid.
She wasn't. Not remotely. She was in the care of living power, and it had made her a promise she believed. The lad, on the other hand, for all its motion and its purpose, reminded her of death. Or rather, of its prelude: of the torments and the hopelessness she'd seen death bring. As it approached the door, and the earth rose up to block its passage, the rock pierced it and clusters of dark matter, almost like eggs, spilled from it, @-di the fouler for their glittering multiplicity. Even if they @vere eggs, Phoebe drought there was death in every gleaming one. When they struck the shore they burst and their gray fluids raced over the stones as if nosing out the darkness beneath.
Wounded though it was, its appetite for the Cosm was not dulled. Besieged by the rock, it continued to advance, thouah the very shore it was crossing had become a second sea, a surf of stone rising up to drive it back.
It was difficult for Phoebe to make out quite what was happening in the chaos, but it seemed that the lad had pressed @i portion of its body towards the threshold and was in the act of crossing over when Texas raised a wall of earth with such speed that he severed the questing limb from the main. The lad let out a sound the like of which Phoebe had never heard in her life, and as it was reeling in its anguish the whole landescape laid before her-highway, dunes, and shore-was Sim ply upended. She saw the lad topple, bursting in a thousand places, spilling its substance, as what had been horizontal moments before rose in a vertical mass above the enemy. It teetered there a long moment.
Then it descended upon the lad-a solid sky, failing and falling@ving the wounded mass into the pit where the shore had been. Even as this spectacle unfolded, Phoebe felt the cocoon shudder, and she was carried away from the maelstrom at speed, deposited at last close to the city limits, where the shore was still intact. She had no sooner come to rest than the cocoon cracked and deteriorated, leaving her exposed. Though she was perhaps two miles from the doorway, the ground was shaking violently and a hail of rock fragments was falling all around, some of the shards big enough to do her damage. Texas had exhausted all his strength, she assumed, to do what he'd done. She could not expect his protection any longer. She got to her feet, though it was difficult to stand upright and, shielding her head with her hands, she stumbled back in the direction of the city.