She had moments, she knew, to make sense of this.
"Name yourselves."
The old man's voice, when it came, was feather-light. "Hubert Nordhoff," he said, "and him'@he pointed to the man at the hearth-"he's Erwin Toothaker."
She was looking in Erwin's direction when she heard another voice: this from behind her.
"When did you learn to raise spirits?"
She'd forgotten Kissoon, in the rush of deliverance. But he hadn't forgotten her. When she looked round at him, he was too astonished by what he'd seen to keep her gaze at bay, and she had a second opportunity to study him in the midst of transformation. He was more naked than he'd been minutes before; much more. All resemblance to Raul had disappeared. In fact, there was barely anything left that was human. The vague shape of a head, formed from a roiling darkness; the last remnants of a ribcage, and a few fragments of leg and arm bones; that was all. The rest-the sinew, the nerves, the veins and the blood that had pulsed in them-had corrupted away.
I think... maybe he's afraid of you, Raul said, his tone astonished. She dared not believe it. Not Kissoon. He was too crazy to be afraid. Look at him, Raul told her. "What am I supposed to be seeing?" Look past the particulars. As she looked, Kissoon spoke again. "You played with me," he said, his tone almost admiring. "You endured the Lix, to prove they were nothing to you."
"You've got the general idea," she said, still trying to do as Raul had instructed, and see what he was so eager she saw.
"Where did you learn to raise spirits?" Kissoon wanted to know.
"Detroit," she said.
"Are you mocking me?"
"No. I learned to raise spirits in the Motor City. Something wrong with that?"
As she spoke, the last portions of Kissoon's usurped anatomy fell away, and with their passing she glimpsed what Raul had already seen. In the center of Kissoon's shadowself, there was another form, glimmering remotely. A spiral, receding from her like a tunnel, as its curves tightened. And at the far end, where her gaze was inexorably drawn, something glittering.
"You don't know what you've done," Kissoon murmured.
His voice shook her from her scrutiny, and she was glad of it. The spiral had claimed her gaze with no little authority. What Kissoon meant by the remark (was he warning her about raising spirits or staring into spirals?) she didn't know; nor was this any time to quiz him. As long as he believed she was a woman who could raise spirits, and might do him harm while he was vulnerable, she might yet escape this room alive.
"Take care-" Kissoon was saying.
"Why's that?" she said, glancing back towards the door. It was probably six, perhaps seven, strides away. If she was to preserve the illusion of authority, she would have to exit without falling flat on her face, which would be a challenge given her trembling limbs.
"If you make any assault upon me now"-he is vulnerable, she thought-"I will have every soul in this city slaughtered. Even for the tiniest harm you do me." So this was the way power treated with power. It was a lesson she might profit from if she had occasion to play bluff with him again.
She didn't reply, however, but pretended to chew the deal over.
"You know I can do it," Kissoon said.
This was true. She didn't doubt him capable of any atrocity. But suppose this was a bluff of his own? Suppose he was so susceptible in his present condition that she might reach into the dark spiral at his core right now, and squeeze the life from him? Don't even think it, Raul said.
Wisdom, no doubt. But oh, she was sorely tempted to try Let's get out while we can, Raul was saying. Tesla? Are you listening to me?
"Yes... " she replied reluctantly. There would never be another opportunity like this, she knew. But Raul's defensive instincts were right. Get out now, and live to fight another day.
There was one last piece of theatrics before she departed, however. She went down on her trembling haunches, and whistled lightly, as if to invisible dogs. She waited a moment, then smiled to welcome her spirits back, and rose again. "Consider this@' Kissoon said as she turned to go.
"What?" "That we're not after all so far apart. You want revelation. So do 1. You want to shake your species up. So do 1. You want power-you already have a little, but a little's never enough-and so do
1. We've taken different paths, but are we not coming to the same spot?"
I 11
'No.
"I think we are. Maybe it's too much for you to admit right now, but you'll see the sense in it. And when you do-".
"I won't." "When you do I want you to know there's a place for you in my heart"-Aid he turn this phrase deliberately, she wondered, tempting her gaze back towards the spiral at his core?-"and I think a place for me in yours."
Say nothing, Raul murmured.
"I want to tell him to fuck off."
I know you do, but leave him guessing. Biting back a retort, she headed for the door, her legs strong enough not to betray her.
"Let me say something snide," Tesla implored.
Don't even look at him, Raul replied.
She took his advice. Without word or glance she opened the door a little wider and slipped out into the cooler air of the hallway.
Phoebe was sitting on the step, her head in her hands. Tesla went to her, comforted her and persuaded her to her feet. Then they hobbled away up the path and down the street, under trees that were sighing in sweet breezes from the mountain.
Perhaps a mile out from the shore, The Fanacapan was caught by a second current, this one of no little ferocity, which threw the vessel around like a plaything before speeding it on its way. The scale of the waves rapidly increased, much to Joe's distress, Lifting the boat up twenty, thirty feet one moment, giving them a precarious perch from which to see the awesome vista ahead, then dropping it like a stone into a trough so deep and dark it seemed with every descent this would be their last, and the foaming waves would bury them. Not so. Each time they rose again, though every board in the vessel creaked, and the decks were awash from bow to stem.
It was impossible to speak under these conditions. All Joe could do was cling to the frame of the wheelhouse door, and pray. It was a long time since he'd begun a sentence with Our Father, but the words came back readily enough, and their familiarity was comforting. Perhaps, he thought, there was even a remote chance that the words were being heard. That notion-which would have seemed naive the day before-did not seem so idiotic now. He'd crossed a threshold into another state of being; a state that was just like another room in a house the size of the cosmos: literally, a step away. If there was one such door to be entered, why not many? And why should one not be a door that led into Heaven?
All his adult life, he'd asked why. Why God? Why meaning? Why love? Now he realized his error. The question was not why; it was why not?
For the first time since childhood, since hearing his grandmother tell Bible stories like reminiscences, he dared to believe; and for all the darkness of the troughs and terrible turmoils that lay ahead, for all the fact that he was soaked to the skin and sickened to his stomach, he was strangely happy with his lot.
If I had Phoebe beside me now, he thought, I'd be lacking nothing.
Tesia refused to answer any of Phoebe's questions until she'd stood under a hot shower for a quarter of an hour, and scrubbed every inch of her body from scalp to feet, sniffing water up her nose and snorting it out to clean the last of the shit from her nostrils and using half a tube of toothpaste and a full bottle of mouthwash to scour her mouth and throat.
That done, she stood in front of the mirror and surveyed her body from as many angles as anatomy allowed. She'd looked better, no doubt of that. There was scarcely six square inches of flesh unmarked by the yellow stain of an old bruise, or the livid purples and reds of a new one, but in its strange way the sight pleased her.