.'And?"
Dolan shook his head. "I don't advise it. The further I went from Everville the more... vague... I became." "Any idea why?"
"Just guessing, but I suppose me and this place must be connected, after all these years. Maybe I can't imagine myself in any other place.
Anyhow, I don't weep and wail any more. I know where I belong." He looked at Erwin. "Speaking of which, I came looking for you for a reason."
"What?" "I was talking to a few friends of mine. Telling them about you and what happened outside my old store, and they wanted to see you."
"This is more-"
"Go on. You can say it." "Ghosts?"
"We prefer revenants. But yeah, ghosts'll do it." "Why do they want to see me?" Dolan got up. "What the hell does it matter to you?" he hollered, suddenly exasperated, "got something better to be doing?"
"No," Erwin said after a moment.
"So are you coming or not? Makes no odds to me."
"I'm coming."
Buddenbaum woke up in a white room, with a splitting headache. There was a sallow young man standing at the bottom of the bed, watching him.
"There you are," the young man said.
Clearly the youth knew him. But Buddenbaum couldn't put a name to his face. His puzzlement was apparently plain, because the kid said, "Owen? It's me. It's Seth." "Seth." The name made a dozen images flicker in Buddenbaum's head, like single frames of film, each from a different scene, strung together on a loop. Round and round they went, ten, twenty times. He glimpsed bare skin, a raging face, sky, more faces, now looking down at him. "I fell."
"Yes.
Buddenbaum ran his palms over his chest, neck, and stomach. "I'm intact."
"You broke some ribs, and cracked some vertebrae and fractured the base of your skull."
"I did?" Buddenbaum's hands went to his head. It was heavily bandaged.
"How long have I been unconscious?"
"Coming up to eight hours." "Eight hours?" He sat up in bed. "Oh my Lord."
"You have to lie down."
"No time. I've got things to do. Important things." He put his hand to his brow. "There's people coming. I've got to be... got to be... Jesus, it's gone out of my head." He looked up at Seth, with desperation on his face. "This is bad," he said, "this is very bad." He grabbed hold of Seth, and drew him closer. "There was some liaison, yes?" Seth didn't know the word. "You and 1, we were coupling-"
"Oh. That. Yes. Yes, we were going' at it, and this gu Bosley, he's a real Christian-"
"Never mind the Christians." Buddenbaum snarled. "Do you trust me?"
"Of course I trust you," Seth said, putting his hand to Buddenbaum's face. "You told me what's going to happen."
"I did, did I? And what did I say?"
"You said there's avatars coming." Seth pronounced the word haltingly.
"They're more than angels, you said." Comprehension replaced the despair on Buddenbaum's face. "The avatars," he said. "Of course." He started to swing his legs off the bed.
"You can't get up," Seth said, "you're hurt."
"I've survived worse than this, believe me," Buddenbaum said. "Now where are my clothes?" He stood up, and made for the small dresser in the corner of the room. "Are we still in Everville?"
"No, we're in Silverton."
"How far's that?" "T'hirty-five miles."
"So how did you get here?" "I borrowed my mother's car. But Owen, you're not well-"
"fhere's more at risk here than a cracked skull," Buddenbaum replied, opening the dresser, and taking out his clothes. "A lot more."
"Like what?"
"It's too complicated-"
"I catch on quickly," Seth replied. "You know I do. You said I do."
"Help me dress." "Is that all I'm good for?" Seth protested. "I'm not just some idiot kid you picked up."
"Then stop acting like one!" Buddenbaum snapped.
Seth immediately withdrew. "Well I guess that's plain enough," he said.
"I didn't mean it that way."
"You want somebody to dress you, ask the nurse. You want a ride back home, hire a cab."
"Seth@'
It was too late. The boy was already out of the door, slamming it behind him. Owen didn't try to go after him. This was no time to waste energy arguing. The boy would come round, given time. And if he didn't, he didn't. In a few hours he would not need the aid-or the affection@f Seth or any other selfwilled youth. He would be free of every frailty, including love; free to live out of time, out of place, out of every particular. He would be unmade, the way divinities were unmade, because divinities were without beginning and without end: a rare and wonderful condition.
As he was halfway through dressing, the doctor-a whey-faced young man with wispy blond hair-appeared. "Mr. Buddenbaum, what are you doing?" he asked.
"I would have thought that perfectly obvious," Owen replied.
"You can't leave."
"On the contrary. I can't stay. I have work to do."
"I'm amazed you're even standing," the doctor said. "I insist you get back into bed." He crossed to Owen, who raised his arms. "Leave me be," he said. "If you want to make yourself useful, call me a cab."
"If you attempt to leave," the doctor said, "I will not be responsible for the consequences." "Fine by me," Owen replied. "Now will you please leave me to dress in peace?" unusually large number of cemeteries. St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery lay two miles outside the city limits on the ulino road, but the other three, the Pioneer Cemetery (the mallest and most historically significant), the Potter emetery (named for the family who had buried more people in the region than any other), and the plain old Everville Cemetery, were all within the bounds of the city. It was to the Potter Cemetery, which lay on Lambroll Drive, close to the Old Post Office building, that Dolan took Erwin.
He chatted in his lively fashion as they went, mostly about how much the city had changed in the last few years. None of it was for the better, in his opinion. So many of the things that had been part of Everville's history-the family businesses, the older buildings, even the streetlamps-were being uprooted or destroyed.
"I didn't think much about that kind of thin when I was 9 breathing," Dolan remarked. "You don't, do you? You get on with your life as best you can. Hope the taxman doesn't come after you; hope you can still get it up on Saturday night; hope your hair doesn't fall out too quickly.
You don't have time to think about the past, until you're part of it. And then-"
"Then?"
"Then you realize what's gone is gone forever, and that's a damn shame if it was something worth keeping." He pointed over at the Post Office building, which had been left to fall into dereliction since a larger and more centralized facility had opened in Salem. "I mean look at that," he said. "That could have been preserved, right? Turned into something for the community."
"What community?" said Erwin. "There isn't one. There's just a few thousand people who happen to live next door to one another, and hate the sight of each other eighty percent of the time. Believe me, I saw a lot of that in my business. People suing each other 'cause a fence was in the wrong place, or a tree had been cut down. Nice neighbors, you'd say, looking at them: regular folks with good hearts. But let me tell you, if the law allowed it, they'd murder each other at the drop of a hat."
This last remark was out of his mouth before he realized quite what he'd said. "I was just trying to protect the children," Dolan muttered.