"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.