Of the singing beauty who'd taken her, and gone to considerable trouble to lay her out this way, there was no sign. Literally none. No foot marks in the grass, no finger prints on her body, nothing. It was as though the abductor had floated as he'd gone about his grim and inexplicable ritual.
A report of these events was added to the Reef that very night, but there was nobody there to read it. Grillo was on his way to Idaho, leaving the reports to accrue behind him at an unprecedented rate. Strange, terrible stories.
In Minnesota, a man undergoing heart surgery had woken on the operating table and despite the anaesthetists' desperate attempts to return him to a comatose state, had warned his surgeons that the tail-eaters were coming, the tai I eaters were coming, and nothing could stop them. Then he'd died.
On the campus of Austin College in Texas, a woman in white, accompanied by what witnesses described as six large albino dogs, was seen disappearing into the ground as though descending a flight of stairs. There was sobbing heard from the earth, so sorrowful one of those who heard it attempted suicide an hour later.
In Atlanta, the Reverend Donald Merrill, midway through a sermon of particular ferocity, suddenly veered from his subject-There is one love, God's love-and began to speak about Imminence. His words were being broadcast across the nation live, and the cameras stayed on him as he pounded and paraded, his vocabulary becoming more obscure with every sentence. Then the subject veered again, on to the subject of human anatomy. The answer is here, he said, starting to undress in front of his astonished flock: in the breast, in the belly, in the groin. By the time he was down to his underwear and socks, the broadcast had been blacked out, but he continued to harangue his assembly anyway, instructing his appalled and fascinated congregation to go home, find a large mirror, and study themselves naked, untii-as he put it-Imminence was over, and time stood still.
There was one report among those swelling the Reef that would have been of particular interest to Tesla, had she known about it; indeed might have changed the course of events to come significantly.
It came from the Baja. Two visitors from England, parapsychologists writing a book on the mysteries of mind and matter, had gone in search of a nearly mythical spot where rumor had it great and terrible events had taken place some years before. This had of course brought them to the spot where Fletcher had first created the Nuncio, the Misi6n de Santa Catrina. There, on a headland overlooking the blue Pacific, they'd been in the midst of photographing the ruins when one of the number who still tended the little shrine that nestled in the rubble came running up to them, tears streaming down her face, and told them that a fire had walked in the misi6n the night before, a fire in the form of a man.
Fletcher, she said, Fletcher, Fletcher... But this tale, like so many others, was soon buried beneath the hundreds that were flooding in every hour from every state. Tales of the freakish and the unfathomable, of the grotesque, the filthy, and the frankly ludicrous. Unminded, unmatched, and now uncared for, the Reef grew in ignorance of itself, a body of knowledge without a head wise to its nature.
Finding the crossroads where Maeve O'Connell had buried the medallion had proved more difficult than Buddenbaum had anticipated. With Seth in tow, he'd spent two hours following Main Street north-northwest and southsoutheast from the square, assuming (mistakenly, as it turned out) that the intersection he was seeking-that crossroads where his journey would end-would be close to the center of town. He found it eventually, two-thirds of a mile from the square; a relatively insignificant spot on Everville's map. There was a modest establishment called Kitty's Diner on one corner, opposite it a small market, and on the other two a rundown garage and what had apparently been a clothing store, its naked mannequins and EVERYTHING MUST GO signs all that remained of its final days.
"What exactly are you looking for?" Seth asked him as they stood surveying the crossroads.
"Nothing now," Buddenbaum replied.
"How do you know this is the right crossroads?"
"I can feel it. It's in the ground. You look up. I look down. We're complementaries." He locked his fingers together. "Like that." He pulled, to demonstrate their adhesion.
"Can we go back to bed soon?" Seth said. "In a while. First I'd like to take a look up there." He nodded towards the windows above the empty store. "We're going to need a vantage point."
"For the parade?" Seth asked.
Buddenbaum laughed. "No. Not for the parade."
"What for ffien?"
"How do I best explain?" "Any way you like."
"There are places in the world where things are bound to happen," Buddenbaum said. "Places where powers come, where... " He fumbled for the words a moment, "Where avatars come."
"What's an avatar?"
"Well, it's a kind of face. The face of something divine."
"Like an angel?"
"More than an angel."
"More?" Seth breathed.
"More."
Seth pondered this a moment. Then he said, "These things-"
"Avatars."
"Avatars. They're coming here?"
"Some of them."
"How do you know?"
Buddenbaum stared down at the ground. "I suppose the simplest answer is that they're coming because I asked them to."
"You did?" Seth said with a little laugh. It clearly delighted him that he was chatting on a street corner with a man who made invitations to divinities. "And they just said yes?"
"It isn't the first time," Buddenbaum replied. "I've supplied many-how shall I put this?-many entertainments for them over the years."
"What kind of things?"
"All kinds. But mostly things that ordinary people would shudder at."
"they like those the best, do they?"
Buddenbaum regarded the youth with frank amazement. "You grasp things very quickly," he said. "Yes. they like those the best. The more bloodshed the better. The more tears, the more grief, the better."
"That's not so different from us, is it?" Seth said, "We like that stuff too."
"Except that this isn't make-believe," Buddenbaum said. 'This isn't fake blood and glycerine tears. they want the real ing. And it's my job to deliver it." He paused, watching the flow of traffic on street and sidewalk. "It isn't always the most pleasant of occupations," he said.
"So why do you do it?"
"I couldn't begin to answer that. Not here. Not now. But if you stay by my side, the answer will become apparent. Trust me."
"I do."
"Good. Well, shall we go?"
Seth nodded, and together they headed across the street towards the untenanted building.
Only when they were on the opposite side of the street, standing in the doorway of the clothing store, did Seth ask Buddenbaum, "Are you afraid?" "Why would I be afraid?"
Seth shrugged. "I would be. Meeting avatars."
"They're just like people, only more evolved," Buddenbaum replied. "I'm an ape to them. We're all apes to them."
"So when they watch us, it's like us going to the zoo?"
"More like a safari," Buddenbaum replied, amused by the aptness of this.
"So maybe they're the nervous ones," Seth remarked. "Coming into the wild."
Buddenbaum stared hard at the kid. "Keep that to yourself," he said forcibly.
"It was only@' Buddenbaum cut him short. "I shouldn't even have told you," he said.
"I won't say anything," Seth replied. 111 mean, who would I tell?" Buddenbaum looked unamused. "I won't say anything, to anybody," Seth said. "I swear." He drew a little closer to Buddenbaum, put his hand on Buddenbaum's arm. "I want to do whatever makes you happy with me," he said, staring into Buddenbaum's face. "You just tell me."