Standing in the gilded light, surveying this collection, she felt like an intruder. Religious displays had seldom if ever moved her. The sentiments were so smug in their certainty, the images so rhetorical. But this display of simple faith touched a nerve she'd thought numbed by cant. She recalled the way she'd felt the first time she'd returned home for Christmas after a self-imposed exile from the family bosom of five years. It had been as claustrophobic as she'd anticipated, but at midnight on Christmas Eve, walking on Fifth Avenue, a forgotten feeling had sucked all the breath from her, and brought her to tears in an instant: that once she had believed. That belief had come from inside, out. Not taught, not bullied, just there. The first tears that had come were gratitude for the bliss of knowing belief again; their sisters, sadness that it passed as quickly as it had come, like a spirit moving through her and away.
This time, it didn't go. This time it deepened in her, as the sun deepened in color, sinking towards the sea.
The sound of somebody moving, deep in the ruins, broke her reverie. Startled, she let her quickened pulse slow a little before asking:
"Who's there?"
There was no reply. Cautiously she ventured past the wall of lost faces and through a lintel-less door into a second chamber. It had two windows, like eyes in the brick, through which the setting sun delivered two ruddy beams. She had nothing except instinct to support the feeling, but she didn't doubt that this was the temple's most sacred place. Though it had no roof, and its eastern wall was grievously damaged, the place seemed charged, as though forces had accrued in it over a period of years. Its function, when Fletcher had occupied the Mission, had evidently been that of laboratory. There were benches overturned on every side, the equipment that had toppled from them apparently left where it had fallen. Neither offerings nor portraits had been allowed to disrupt this sense of a place preserved. Though sand had gathered around the fallen furniture, and seedlings sprouted here and there, the chamber was as it had been: testament to a miracle; or to its passing.
The protector of the sanctum stood in the corner furthest from Tesla, beyond the shafts from the window. She could make out little about him. Only that he was either masked or had features as broadly formed as those of a mask. Nothing she'd experienced here so far led her to fear for her safety. Though she was alone, she felt no anxiety. This was a sanctuary not a place of violence. Besides, she came on the business of the deity that had once worked in this very chamber. She had to speak with his authority.
"My name's Tesla," she said. "I was sent here by Doctor Richard Fletcher."
She saw the man in the corner respond to the name with a slow upward motion of the head; then heard him sigh.
"Fletcher?" he said.
"Yes," Tesla replied. "Do you know who he is?"
The answer was another question delivered with a heavily Hispanic accent: "Do I know you?"
"I told you," Tesla said. "He sent me here. I've come to do what he himself asked me to do."
The man stepped away from the wall, far enough for his features to touch the beams.
"Could he not come himself?" he said.
It took Tesla a few moments to muster a reply. The sight of the man's heavy brow and lumpen nose had thrown her thoughts into a spin. Quite simply she'd never seen in the flesh a face so ugly.
"Fletcher isn't alive any more," she replied after a moment, her thoughts half on repugnance, half on how instinctively she'd avoided using the word dead.
The wretched features in front of her became sorrowful, something in their plasticity almost making a caricature of that emotion.
"I was here when he left," the man said. "I've been waiting for him to...come back."
She knew who he was as soon as he proffered this information. Fletcher had told her there might be a living remnant of the Great Work left.
"Raul?" she said.
The deep-set eyes grew wide. They showed no whites. "You do know him," he said, and took another quicker step into the light, which carved his features so cruelly she could barely look at him. She'd countless times seen creatures on the screen more studiedly vile than this—and the night before been bloodied by a beast of nightmare design—but the confusion of signals from this hybrid distressed her more than anything she'd set eyes on. It was so close to being human, yet her innards were not deceived. The response taught her something, though she wasn't quite certain what. She put the lesson aside for more urgent stuff.
"I've come to destroy whatever remains of the Nuncio," she said.
"Why?"
"Because Fletcher wants it that way. His enemies are still in the world, even though he isn't. He fears for the consequences if they come here and find the experiment."
"But I've waited..." Raul said.
"It's good that you did. It's good you guarded the place."
"I haven't moved. All these years. I've stayed where my father made me."
"How have you survived?"
Raul looked away from Tesla, squinting into the sun, which was almost gone from sight.
"The people look after me," he said. "They don't understand what happened here, but they know I was a part of it. The Gods were on this hill, once. That's what they believe. Let me show you."
He turned and led Tesla out of the laboratory. Beyond the door was another, barer chamber; this with a single window. The walls had been painted, she saw; murals whose naive rendering merely emphasized the passion with which they were felt.
"This is the story of that night," Raul said, "as they believe it happened."
There was no more light here than in the room they'd exited, but the murk lent mystery to the images.
"Here's the Mission as it was," Raul said, indicating an almost emblematic picture of the cliff upon which they were standing. "And there's my father."
Fletcher stood in front of the hill, face white and wild against its darkness, his eyes twin moons. Strange forms sprang from his ears and mouth, and hung around his head like satellites.
"What are those?" Tesla enquired.
"His ideas," came Raul's reply. "I painted those."
"What kind of ideas look like that?"
"Things from the sea," came the reply. "Everything comes from the sea. Fletcher told me that. At the beginning, the sea. At the end, the sea. And between—"
"Quiddity," said Tesla.
"What?"
"He didn't tell you about Quiddity?"
"No."
"Where humans go to dream?"
"I'm not human," Raul gently reminded her. "I'm his experiment."
"Surely that's what made you human," Tesla said. "Isn't that what the Nuncio does?"
"I don't know," Raul said simply. "Whatever it did to me, I don't thank it for. I was happier...being an ape. If I'd stayed an ape I'd be dead by now."
"Don't talk that way," Tesla said. "Fletcher wouldn't want to hear you full of regrets."
"Fletcher left me," Raul reminded her. "He taught me enough to know what I could never be, then he left me."
"He had his reasons. I've seen his enemy, the Jaff. The man has to be stopped."
"There—" said Raul, pointing to a place further along the wall. "There's Jaffe."
The portrait was able enough. Tesla recognized the devouring stare, the swollen head. Had Raul actually seen Jaffe in his evolved condition or was this portrait of man as monstrous babe an instinctive response? She had no opportunity to enquire. Raul was coaxing her away again.
"I'm thirsty," he said. "We can look at the rest later."