"What?"
"Older. Closer to death."
"Oh shit. I don't want to be closer to death."
"No choice," Raul said simply. Tesla shook her head. It kept moving, long after the motion had ceased.
"I want to understand," she said finally.
"Anything in particular?"
She mused a little more, running through all the possible options, and came up with one.
"Everything?" she said.
He laughed, and his laughter sounded like bells to her. Good trick, she was about to tell him, until she realized that he was up and at the door.
"Somebody's at the Mission," she heard him say.
"...come to light the candles," she suggested, her head seeming to precede her body in pursuit of him.
"No," he said to her as he stepped out into the darkness. "They don't step where the bells are..."
She had been staring into the candle flame as she'd mulled over Raul's questions, and its image was imprinted on the darkness she now stumbled through, a will o' the wisp that might have led her over the cliff-edge had she not followed his voice. As they approached the walls he told her to stay where she was but she ignored him and followed anyway. The candlelighters had indeed come visiting; their handiwork threw its glamour through from the room of portraits. Though the contents of Raul's cigarette had put space between her thoughts they were cogent enough to fear that she'd idled too long, and that her purpose here was now in jeopardy. Why hadn't she just found the Nuncio immediately and pitched it into the ocean as Fletcher had directed? Her irritation with herself made her bold. In the murk of the mural room she managed to overtake Raul and so step through into the candlelit laboratory first.
It was not candles that had been lit here, nor was the visitor a supplicant.
In the middle of the chamber a small, smoky fire had been lit, and a man—with his back at present turned to her— was ferreting through the tangle of equipment with his bare hands. She had not expected to recognize him when he looked in her direction, which was, on reflection, foolish. In the last few days she'd come to know most of the actors in this piece, if not by name then at least by sight. This one she knew by both. Tommy-Ray McGuire. He turned full face. In the perfect symmetry of his features a little ball of lunacy— the Jaff's inheritance—bounded back and forth, glittering.
"Hi!" he said; a bland, casual greeting. "I wondered where you were. The Jaff said you'd be here."
"Don't touch the Nuncio," she told him. "It's dangerous."
"That's what I'm hoping," he said with a grin.
There was something in his hand, she saw. Catching her glance he proffered it. "Yeah, I got it," he said. The vial was indeed as Fletcher had described it.
"Throw it away," she advised, attempting to be cool.
"Was that what you were going to do?" he asked.
"Yes. I swear, yes. It's lethal."
She saw his eyes flit from her face to Raul, whose breath she heard behind and a little to the side of her. Tommy-Ray looked in no way concerned at being outnumbered. Indeed she wondered if there was any threat to life or limb that would dislodge the smug satisfaction from his face. The Nuncio, perhaps? God Almighty, what possibilities would it find waiting in his barbaric heart, to praise and magnify?
Again she said: "Destroy it, Tommy-Ray, before it destroys you."
"No way," he said. "The Jaff's got plans for it."
"And what about you, when you've finished working for him? He doesn't care about you."
"He's my father and he loves me," Tommy-Ray replied, with a certainty that would have been touching in a sane soul.
She began to move towards him, talking as she went. "Just listen to me for a few moments, will you...?"
He pocketed the Nuncio, and reached into his other pocket as he did so. He brought out a gun.
"What did you call the stuff?" he asked, pointing the weapon at her.
"Nuncio," she said, slowing her advance but still approaching steadily.
"No. Something else. You called it something else."
"Lethal."
He grinned. "Yeah," he said, slurring the word. "Lethal. That means it kills you, right?"
"Right."
"I like that."
"No, Tommy..."
"Don't tell me what I like," he said. "I said I like lethal and I mean it."
She suddenly realized she'd entirely miscalculated this scene. If she'd written it, he'd have held her at gunpoint till he made his escape. But he had his own scenario.
"I'm the Death-Boy," he said, and pulled the trigger.
Unnerved by the episode at Ellen's house, Grillo had taken refuge in writing, a discipline he felt more in need of the deeper this pool of ambiguities became. At first it was easy. He struck out for the dry ground of fact, and stated it in prose Swift would have been proud of. Later he could extract from this account the sections to be sent through to Abernethy. For now his duty was to set down as much as he could remember.
Mid-way through the process, he got a call from Hotchkiss, who suggested that they might have an hour drinking and talking together. The Grove had only two bars, he explained, Starky's, in Deerdell, being the less tame of the two and consequently the preferable. An hour after the conversation, with the bulk of the previous night's events securely laid on paper, Grillo left the hotel and met with Hotchkiss. Starky's was practically empty. In one corner an old man sat quietly singing to himself, and there were two kids at the bar who looked too young to be drinking; otherwise they had the place to themselves. Even so, Hotchkiss barely raised his voice above a whisper throughout the entire conversation.
"You don't know much about me," he said at the outset. "I realized that last night. It's time you knew."
He didn't need any further encouragement to tell. His account was offered without emotion, as though the burden of feeling were so heavy it had long ago squeezed the tears from him. Grillo was glad of the fact. If the teller could be dispassionate then it freed him to be the same, probing between the lines of Hotchkiss's account for details the man had passed over. He spoke of Carolyn's part in the story first, of course, not praising or damning his daughter, merely describing her and the tragedy that had taken her from him. Then he threw the net of his story wider, and drew in others, first giving a thumbnail portrait of Trudi Katz, Joyce McGuire and Arleen Farrell, then relating how each of them had fared. Grillo was busily filling in details for himself as Hotchkiss spoke: creating a family tree whose roots went where Hotchkiss's account so often returned: underground.
"That's where the answers are," he said more than once. "I believe Fletcher and the Jaff, whoever they are, whatever they are, were responsible for what happened to my Carolyn. And to the other girls."
"They were in the caves all this time?"
"We saw them escape didn't we?" Hotchkiss said. "So yes, I think they waited down there all these years." He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch. "After last night at the Mall I just stayed up, trying to work it all out. Trying to make sense of it all."
"And?"
"I've decided to go down into the caves."
"What the hell for?"
"All those years, locked away, they must have been doing something. Maybe they left clues. Maybe we can find a way to destroy them down there."
"Fletcher's already gone," Grillo reminded him.
"Has he?" Hotchkiss said. "I don't know any more. Things linger, Grillo. They seem to disappear, but they linger, just out of sight. In the mind. In the ground. You climb down a little way and you're in the past. Every step another thousand years."
"My memory doesn't go back that far," Grillo quipped.
"But it does," Hotchkiss said, in deadly earnest. "It goes back to being a speck in the sea. That's what haunts us." He raised his hand. "Looks solid, doesn't it?" he said. "But it's mostly water." He seemed to be struggling for another thought, but it wouldn't come.