"Are you kidding me?"
"Not all the dreams. Just the important ones. You see, Tommy-Ray, I'm an explorer."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Only what's left to explore outside in the world? Not much. A few pockets of desert; a rain-forest—"
"Space," Tommy-Ray suggested, glancing up.
"More desert, and a lot of nothing between," the Jaff said. "No, the real mystery—the only mystery—is inside our heads. And I'm going to get to it."
"You don't mean like a shrink, do you? You mean being there, somehow."
"That's right."
"And the Art is the way in?"
"Right again."
"But you said it's just dreams. We all dream. You can get in there any time you like, just by falling asleep."
"Most dreams are just juggling acts. Folks picking up their memories and trying to put them in some kind of order. But there's another kind of dream, Tommy-Ray. It's a dream of what it means to be born, and fall in love, and die. A dream that explains what being is for. I know this is confusing..."
"Go on. I like to hear anyhow."
"There's a sea of mind. It's called Quiddity," the Jaff said. "And floating in that sea is an island which appears in the dreams of every one of us at least twice in our lives: at the beginning and at the end. It was first discovered by the Greeks. Plato wrote of it in a code. He called it Atlantis..." He faltered, distracted from the telling by the substance of his tale.
"You want this place very much, don't you?" Tommy-Ray said.
"Very much," said the Jaff. "I want to swim in that sea when I choose, and go to the shore where the great stories are told."
"Rad."
"Huh?"
"It sounds awesome."
The Jaff laughed. "You're reassuringly crass, son. We're going to get on fine, I can tell. You can be my agent in the field, right?"
"Sure," said Tommy-Ray with a grin. Then: "What's that?"
"I can't show my face to just anybody," the Jaff said. "Nor do I much like the daylight. It's very...unmysterious. But you can get out and about for me."
"You're staying then? I thought maybe we'd go off someplace."
"We will, later. But first, my enemy must be killed. He's weak. He won't try to leave the Grove until he has some protection. He'll look for his own child, I'd guess."
"Katz?"
"That's right."
"So I should kill Katz."
"That sounds like a useful thing to do, if the opportunity presents itself."
"I'll make sure it does."
"Though you should thank him."
"Why?"
"Were it not for him I'd still be underground. Still be waiting for you or Jo-Beth to put the pieces together and come and find me. What she and Katz did—"
"What did they do? Did they fuck?"
"That matters to you?"
"Sure it does."
"To me too. The thought of Fletcher's child touching your sister sickens me. For what it's worth, it sickened Fletcher too. For once, we agreed on something. The question was, which one of us would make it to the surface first, and which would be strongest when we got here?"
"You."
"Yes, me. I have an advantage Fletcher lacks. My army, my terata, are best drawn out of dying men. I drew one from Buddy Vance."
"Where is it?"
"When we were coming up here you thought somebody was following us, remember? I told you it was a dog. I lied."
"Show me."
"You may not be so eager when you see it."
"Show me, Poppa. Please!"
The Jaff whistled. At the sound, the trees a little way behind him began to move, identifying the face that had thrashed the thicket to fragments in the yard. This time, however, that face came into view. It was like something the tide had washed up: a deep-sea monster that had died and floated to the surface, been baked by the sun and pecked at by gulls, so that by the time it reached the human world it had fifty eye-holes and a dozen mouths, and its skin was half flayed from it.
"Gross," Tommy-Ray said softly. "You got that from a comedian? Don't look too funny to me."
"It came from a man on the brink of death," the Jaff said. "Frightened and alone. They always produce fine specimens. I'll tell you sometime the places I've gone looking for lost souls to produce terata from. The things I've seen. The scum I've met..." He looked out over the town. "But here?" he said. "Where will I find such subjects here?"
"You mean people dying?"
"I mean people vulnerable. People without mythologies to protect them. Frightened people. Lost people. Mad people."
"You could begin with Momma."
"She's not mad. She may wish she were; she may wish she could dismiss all she's seen and suffered as hallucinations, but she knows better. And she's protected herself. She has a faith, however idiot it is. No...I need naked people, Tommy-Ray. Folks without deities. Lost folk."
"I know a few."
Tommy-Ray could have taken his father to literally hundreds of households, had he been able to read the minds behind the faces that he passed every day of his life. People shopping in the Mall, loading their carts up with fresh fruit and wholesome cereals, people with good complexions, like his own, and clear eyes, like his own, who seemed in every regard self-possessed and happy. Maybe they'd see an analyst once in a while, just to keep themselves on an even keel; maybe they'd raise their voices to the children, or cry to themselves when another birthday marked another year, but they considered themselves to all intents and purposes souls at peace. They had more than enough money in the bank; the sun was warm most days, and when it wasn't they lit fires and thought themselves robust to survive the chill. If asked, they would have called themselves believers in something. But nobody asked. Not here; not now. It was too late in the century to talk about faith without a twinge of embarrassment, and embarrassment was a trauma they labored to keep from spoiling their lives. Safer not to speak of faith, then, or the divinities who inspired it, except at weddings, baptisms and funerals, and only then by rote.
So. Behind their eyes the hope in them was sickening, and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been, and breathing a sigh of relief when the children passed the point of asking questions about what life was for.
Not everyone hid their fears so well, however.
At the age of thirteen Ted Elizando's class was told by a forward-thinking teacher that the superpowers held enough missiles between them to destroy civilization many hundreds of times over. The thought had bothered him far more than it seemed to bother his classmates, so he'd kept his nightmares of Armageddon to himself for fear of being laughed at. The deception worked; on Ted as much as the classmates. Through his teens he'd virtually forgotten the fears. At twenty-one, with a good job in Thousand Oaks, he married Loretta. They were parents the following year. One night, a few months after the birth of baby Dawn, the nightmare of the final fire came back. Sweaty and shaking, Ted got up and went to check on his daughter. She was asleep in her cot, sprawled on her stomach, the way she liked to sleep. He watched her slumbers for an hour or more, then went back to bed. The sequence of events repeated itself almost every night thereafter, until it had the predictability of ritual. Sometimes the baby would turn over in her sleep and her long-lashed eyes would flicker open. Seeing her daddy there by her cot she would smile. The vigil took its toll on Ted, however. Night after night of broken sleep drained him of strength; he found it steadily more difficult to prevent the horrors that came by the hours of darkness invading those of light. Sitting at his desk in the middle of the working day the terrors would visit him. The spring sun, shining on the papers before him, became the blinding brightness mushrooming in front of him. Every breeze, however balmy, carried distant cries to his ears.