Blue Light

Interlude

After Ordé’s death, and the deaths of so many others I’d loved, I took Adelaide and the children and ran. We found our way to the forests north of San Francisco, living off the checkbook I’d kept for Ordé. We were running for our lives, but sadness, not fear, was our common companion.

Whole days were spent when Addy and I never said a word. We were horrified and numb. The children played or watched TV, when the motel we stayed in that week had a TV, but they cried before going to sleep every night. Wanita had nightmares about losing an eye or a limb. Reggie ran in his sleep, jittering in his bed like a dog, remembering some fright from the day before.

Alacrity called out for the father she’d known only a few hours. The only way she’d go to sleep was for me to sit next to her and stroke her shoulders.

I read the newspapers every day looking for news about Gray Man or Horace LaFontaine. But there was no news about the massacre after the first couple of weeks. Miles Barber had survived Gray Man’s attack, though he was badly disfigured and severely injured. One account that described his condition said that he had to be held in restraints to keep him from tearing the flesh from his face. He was in constant pain and ranted continually about the devil roaming the world.

The police labeled the Close Congregation a cult and blamed the episode on drug use. The public dismemberments were called the “culmination of a series of sacrifices,” which, they said, included all the poisonings and the murder of Phyllis Yamauchi.

Arrest warrants were issued for various congregation members, including me. Because of the police I spent much of my time hidden in the back of the used VW van we purchased. Addy did the driving and checked us into cabins and motels.

We moved around a lot, rarely staying more than a week in any one place. Our nomadic routine continued for months. The depression that filled up our days was punctuated now and then by high points of fear. Fear that the police would arrest us and keep us in one place long enough for Death to come.

Nothing happened. We just moved around the woods, sighing and crying, hiding in efficiency cabins and hoping for some kind of sign. Reggie was always on the lookout for the perfect hiding place. There was someplace to hide, he was sure, but its location was always just beyond his perception.

But we weren’t the only part of the story. Gray Man hadn’t stamped out light or life yet. Others were grouping and regrouping on different sides. While I was hiding in backseats or bathrooms, Claudia Heart and Nesta Vine and Juan Thrombone were plotting, gathering, and evoking the words that spoke God. There was the police investigation and the perversions of love. A lot happened before our story continued and so for the sake of the continuity of my History I shall tell first about the events that occurred while we hid in the woods.

I learned these stories from newspaper articles and secondhand sources. Every now and then I gleaned my knowledge through blood. And for a while there, I learned while sharing the dreams of the closest friends I ever had.

It doesn’t really matter how I learned what I know, not now anyway. Maybe in some far-flung future, when science is not estranged from the soul, someone may find this text and know how to believe in it.

Nine

Winch Fargo lay in his cell, eyes closed, arms and legs bloodied, pale and incoherent. Every once in a while he’d mutter, “Cunt,” thinking about Eileen Martel, about how she hadn’t been to see him in months. He lay back with his teeth clenched, trying not to hear the music that played only half the melody, trying not to see the small part of what he could never become. In his dreams he’d see himself stalking a man he hates. The man runs scared and Winch falls on him with a knife, but always he turns into the victim at the moment of his thrust, the knife buried in his own chest. The old woman he sodomizes in this dream becomes him. The food he eats, the ground he stomps on. The shit from his ass.

He is everything but himself. A chicken with no head, a planet with no sun.

He groaned on his prison cot but could not move because his arms and legs were tied. He didn’t care about the cuts and scars along his limbs. He didn’t care about the men who bled him, mixing the blood with powdered milk to drink or inject into their veins.

The blood drug, that’s what the brothers called it. One teaspoon, and the prison fell away for a while. One teaspoon, and there was no pain, no sorrow.

“Shit, I’d kill ten motherfuckers just to come back here and get some’a this shit,” Mackie Allitar once said while squeezing the blood from a slit in Winch’s thumb.

One teaspoon, and an illiterate man could learn to read, a bodybuilder could double his dead lift, a stutterer could recite his family tree without a hitch.

Winch didn’t know it at the time, but they called him the Farm. They had to feed the farm and work it. They had to harvest the farm and keep it alive.

It hadn’t always been like that. Before Eileen Mattel disappeared, Winch discovered the potential of his blood and dispersed it.

But when Eileen had gone, Winch lost his mind again and his customers made him their little acre. They tied him down on a prison cot and got high off his veins.

And all the while Winch stalked himself, ate his flesh, excreted his soul.

He never slept, not really. He felt them cutting him, milking his veins. But the greatest pain was when the iron door to his cell swung open, causing the air to move over his skin like a blanket of white-hot pins.

He yelled from pain, but a hand clamped down over his mouth. His arms and legs were freed from the cot but then were tied together. A gag was shoved into his mouth and then taped over. He was put into a large cloth bag and hoisted over a broad back. The rocking motion of being carried like that calmed Winch somewhat. The snake that lived in his brain was lulled. He couldn’t move or speak. It was as if life had not started yet, as if pain was still far off, only a possibility.

Winch Fargo was soothed in the dark trunk he was loaded into. The hum of the motor and the occasional bump in the road felt womblike. He came halfway to consciousness in there. Half sane. He even wondered where it was they were taking him.

He wondered if Eileen might be there sending off those signals like the good songs on the radio when he was a boy in Missouri.

Before they dumped him from the bag, he felt her. He wasn’t surprised to see the big blond guard Robert Halston. He didn’t care about how skinny he was or how infected his arms and legs had become. All he cared about was the mousy brunette reclining on the couch before him. He wanted to reach for her, but his hands were still tied.

He didn’t care. She was his beacon and he’d never be far from her side again in life.

“Winch Fargo,” the dazzling image said. “I am Claudia Heart and you are the grandfather to my brood.”

The convict stood just behind and to the left of the warden’s guest chair. His black skin was ashen, the whites of his eyes were more bloody than bloodshot. Slight jerking tremors went through his body every few seconds or so.

“Where is he, Allitar?” Warden Reed asked.

“I ’ont know... sir.”

“Mackie, you have to know,” said Peter Mainhart, chief of guards. “They say you had him tied to a cot in Detention Cell Forty-eight. They say that you and Halston and some other cons were selling him as some kind of sex slave down there.”

“I ’ont know nuthin’ about that, sir.”

Mackie twitched and the warden stood up from his desk. He wasn’t a tall man, but every con in Folsom Prison was afraid when he stood to full stature.

“Where are Halston and Fargo?” Reed asked.

“I wisht I knew,” Allitar said, then shuddered so violently that he had to pull the chair back and sit in it.

“What’s wrong, Mackie?” Mainhart asked. “You need a fix?”

Mackie raised his ruined face to the warden, ignoring the senior guard’s question. He tried to say something; maybe he felt that his yowling groan was answer enough.

“Get him out of here, Peter,” the warden said.

“Richards, Weiner!” Mainhart shouted.

Two prison guards dressed in blue came into the room. One was tall and lanky; the other was shaped like two eggs, the smaller one being his head and the larger comprising his body.

“Take him to solitary,” Mainhart told his men.

Mackie Allitar fell to the ground, sobbing. He looked up at the four white men and cried some more. When Mainhart demanded that he get up, Mackie did as he was told. He let the guards lead him from the warden’s office even though he was still big enough and powerful enough to have killed every man in the room. He didn’t think about killing, though. All he thought about was that bluity; all he wanted to do was the blood drug.

“There’s something wrong here, Peter,” Warden Reed said when they were alone again.

The warden was a colorful man. His curly brown hair had red highlights and his blue eyes were almost impossible. His skin drank up the sun in the summer until he seemed to belong on the Caribbean Islands, where he and his family took their vacations.

Mainhart was the warden’s opposite in coloring. His white hair had no shine and there was no red under his pale skin. His flat brown eyes were lusterless and could have belonged to a corpse.

“It’s a weird one, I agree,” Mainhart said. “All this homo drug addict stuff... They should line ’em all up at the gas chamber and forget jail altogether.”

“You say they had the drug down in Fargo’s cell?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you bring it?”

Mainhart left the room for a moment and then returned with a plain brown shoe box. He placed it in front of the warden and lifted off the lid.

Inside were a dozen tiny wax paper packets, a few hypodermic needles, a tarnished spoon, and some matches — all on a bed of cotton balls. Warden Reed unwrapped one of the packages, revealing a hard black lump somewhat resembling tar. When the warden squeezed the lump, it turned instantly to dust.

“What is it?” the warden asked.

“Don’t know,” Mainhart replied. “It’s not opium or hash. I don’t know what it is.”

“What about Halston’s family? Has he gotten in touch with them?”

“He moved out four weeks ago,” Mainhart said. “Just told Millie that he was going to stay at a flophouse down in Los Gatos and never came back.”

“You check the hotel?”

“He never even stayed one night. He just paid the owner to say he wasn’t in if somebody called. A couple of the other guards said that he’d met some hippie chick in the Safeway supermarket. He said that she took him out to her van in the parking lot and fucked him right there. Right there in the parking lot, for Christ’s sake. In the middle of the day. He said that he was in love with her, that he couldn’t even be with Millie after that.”

The warden massaged his face with both hands and made a small chirping sound in the back of his throat. “How long now?” he asked.

“Sixteen hours since we realized it. He’s probably been gone for two days, though. Thursday and Friday were Halston’s weekend. He coulda taken Fargo out anytime. Nobody else went to that cell when he was on duty. It was solitary. It was his detail.”

Warden Reed looked at the dark powder. His fingers tingled slightly. He took a paper towel from his bottom drawer and wiped the drug away, but the tingling remained.

“Report the escape,” Reed told Mainhart. “Tell them that we’re not quite sure when it happened. Tell them we just thought that Fargo had been misplaced and sent someone out to Halston’s house. Tell them it wasn’t until then that we realized that it was a break. Tell them...” Reed’s voice trailed off.

“What?” Mainhart asked. “What did you say, chief?”

“Huh?”

“You were saying something.”

“Oh.” Reed looked at the paleness of his chief guard’s features. “Tell them... tell them that I got sick and had to go home.”

“But, sir, don’t you think with the break and all that, you better...”

Gerin Reed stood up from his desk feeling like a titan. He had always been a short man and he was still the same height, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

“You can take care of it, Peter. You can talk to them. Tell them that I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about being sick.”

The puzzle in the head guard’s face tickled the warden.

“Tell me something, Peter.”

“What’s that, Warden?”

“Did you ever run down a beach as fast as you could, laughing the whole way and then, just when you’re going your fastest, want to take off and fly? But you know you can’t fly, and now running doesn’t seem to be as much fun anymore. I mean, if you can imagine flight, if you can feel it in your arms and down your spine, then... how can you go back to running?”

“I think you should see a doctor, Gerry. Maybe that dust can get in through your pores.”

“Nonsense. Nothing like that. I’m just sick, that’s all. Just sick. Just sick.”

Warden Reed walked out of his office and told his secretary that he’d need his car brought to the front of the prison. He waited patiently as the various locked doors were unlocked. He waited for the guards at the front as they searched his backseat and trunk. They were on special alert. The prison horns were sounding, announcing to the world that someone had escaped.

Warden Reed was looking at the foothills on the horizon. He imagined Winch Fargo out there running as hard as he could, wishing for flight.

His Ford’s engine sounded as good as it ever would, and the road was smooth. Every once in a while Warden Reed turned on his blinker and changed lanes for no reason. He let his mind wander as he drove a few miles above the speed limit toward his home in the Loma Linda Hills.

He thought about how when he was a boy he wished he could live in a nice house like the one he and his wife now owned. Their children had toys and comforts that he could never afford when he was a child back in Kentucky. Back then all his toys were sticks and thrown-away things that he imagined had magical powers. His red fire engine was a squared-off piece of kindling from the firewood his father cut into cords and sold. His air force was a squadron of leaves taking off every autumn for the German lines.

And when he looked off into the stars at night and asked his father if there was ever an end to all that way out there, his father would say, “I don’t have time to think about questions like that, Gerry, and neither do you. Now get to bed.”

Lying there in the bed, little Gerin thought about the stars and how they got there and where they came from.

On the day he left work early he was thinking about those stars. The sky was blue now, the stars hidden. Gerin imagined a world that was completely black, no light at all. He was looking out into the imagined blackness, and then slowly a large red rose came into being. Was it there before he saw it? Was it there in the blackness? Gerin didn’t know the answer, but he planned to go home and think about it. He knew that the answer to that question was in him. He knew that he’d been asking that question his whole life. And now, with a great sigh of relief, he could go home and sit back and think on it.

He parked the car in the street because there was another car in his driveway. He went up the concrete path through the lawn with the key out, but the door was unlocked.

He could hear them before he rounded the corner from the entranceway into the sunken living room. The young man’s sports jacket was thrown on the plastic-covered couch, and her dressing gown was on the floor. His pants were down around his ankles and he was on his knees holding one of her legs high enough to give a clear view of his large erection poised at the entrance of her gaping vagina. Karen’s butt was quivering — beautifully, Gerin thought.

“You want it?” the man on his knees asked.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Karen responded.

“No uh-uh,” the man said. “You gotta tell me if you want this.”

“Please,” Karen whispered.

“What?”

“Please put it in!”

Gerin thought of magic again when he saw his wife’s lover’s penis disappear there next to her quivering thigh. And then her loud moaning made him remember the rose coming out of nowhere.

“That’s what you been thinkin’ about, huh?” The man’s voice was huskier now. “That’s what you been wantin’?”

Karen barked out half a dozen clear “oh!”s and began to thrash around. When she reached around to caress his testicles, she saw something, a shadow maybe, and screeched as if in pain. She crawled away from her lover, leaving his full erection bobbing in the air.

“Hi, Karen,” Gerin said to his wife, and to her visitor, “hello.”

The lovers scrambled clumsily, grabbing for their clothes.

Karen donned her special nightgown, the one she took on their trip to Barbados, trying to make it look like normal clothes. She stood in front of the man — protecting him, it seemed to Gerin. Karen’s left cheek still had the rough impression of the carpet on it.

“Now don’t go crazy now, Gerry. Don’t get wild.” She was looking at his hands and belt line.

Gerin remembered that he was supposed to be angry if he found his wife of twenty years having sex with someone else. He was supposed to have a gun out. It was one of the few times he could kill in cold blood and get away with it — outside of the prison walls.

The lover was a young man, overweight. He had his pants up and his jacket on. He looked once at Gerin and then ran for the back door through the kitchen. Karen looked after him for a second and then turned back to Gerin, putting out her arms like a mother goose protecting her young.

Gerin saw all of this, but his mind was back at the prison. Back on the times when he’d be brought to the scene of a brutal beating, the corpse of a convict as its centerpiece. He listened to the lies the guards told of suicide or a fight among convicts. He knew when one of his own had murdered. The prison doctor would write up the death certificate. The county coroner would stamp it with his approval. The body was either buried or sent home following a letter from the warden himself giving condolences for the terrible mishap or self-demolition.

“Gerry, he doesn’t mean a thing to me. It just happened. I can’t deny it but... Gerry, are you listening to me?”

“Why don’t you put on something, Karrie? Call Sonia to come and sit for the kids and we can go out to dinner.”

Ray’s Lobster Grotto was painted all in red and looked out over the bay. It was an hour and a half drive from their house, but Gerin didn’t mind. He drove down toward the ocean, excited by every shift of hue caused by the setting sun. He kept moving his hands along the smooth steering wheel.

“Talk to me, Gerry,” Karen said when they came to a stop in Ray’s gravel parking lot. It was still early, so they were the only car there.

“About what, honey?”

“You know what. For God’s sake, you found me with another man on our living-room floor.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who cares what his name is?” Karen said. “What are you going to do?”

“Do,” Gerin Reed repeated.

“Talk to me, Gerry.”

“You asked me what I’m going to do, baby. What am I going to do?”

“Gerry, what’s wrong?” Karen asked with real concern in her voice. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I mean, you’ve never come home like that; I mean, you don’t just come home in the middle of the day.”

“It’s just like TV,” Gerin said. “Just like Gunsmoke or Bonanza or even The Dakotas. You know, like in the real West, but on TV with commercials and station breaks. Not real. Not important or anything. Just something you watch at the same time every week. But it’s not like the sunset or the fall. It’s not like being hungry. It happens, but it doesn’t matter.”

“What are you talking about, Gerry?” Karen reached out to touch her husband but then pulled her hand back.

He looked at her. Forty-two but with the same body she had when he first met her in college. Her wide smile still hiding under the concern.

“Going to work. Going to church. Getting my hair cut, buying shoes, listening to the radio, talking to Madge and Dan Hurley about their kids.” Gerin reached over, taking her tentative hand in his. “Today I realized that I hadn’t ever left early or anything like that. There was trouble up at the prison, but I didn’t have to worry about it. Today was the first time I thought about things in years. And then when I got home and saw you with that man... You should have seen your butt, Karrie...”

“Gerry!” Karen pulled her hand from him.

“But you should have seen it. It was up in the air quivering and shaking. You were really happy, all excited. You felt just like I do. You got it from that boy, and I did by walking away from work.”

“What happened at work?”

“A prisoner escaped with the help of a guard. They’re both gone.”

“When did it happen?”

“We found out today,” Gerin said wistfully. “But it happened two or three days ago.”

“Gerry, you have to be there. You can’t just leave like that. They’ll fire you.”

Gerin looked at his wife and felt happy that she still cared even though she got her magic from other men. He thought about their phone at home and about how Sonia had the phone number of Ray’s Grotto.

“I don’t want to eat here,” Gerin said. “Let’s go down to Frisco. Let’s have dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf.”

Ten

Nesta Vine lived only four blocks from Horace LaFontaine. She worked at the West Oakland library and came home every night with a stack of books in her arms. Novels, biographies, histories, and learning texts, she read everything, remembered everything, but she told her grandparents, “I don’t understand what it all means.”

“All it means is that you one smart black girl,” her grandfather, Lythe Charm, would say.

Then she’d kiss him on the lips and go upstairs to read while he puttered around with the soup her grandmother had made.

Up in her room she closed the doors and forgot all the things that she knew: her mottled brown skin, her sex, the years going by. Nesta thought that she was ugly and that all her intelligence was only in her eyes. She could see things and remember them, but nobody remembered her.

She was reading The Birds by Aristophanes when blue light struck. She’d raised her eyes for a moment, wondering if there was a textbook on ancient Greek at the main branch of the library. She wondered what kind of lilts and accents the different Greeks had, when the light came into her mind and illuminated all the millions of words that she’d read.

She inhaled deeply and gazed out over the multicolored three-story houses on Mill Street. She saw equations and plotlines, lies and errors. She imagined building a three-masted schooner and then set up a test model around a hydroponic element designed to extend the girth of root vegetables. And as these experiments unfolded in her mind, she monitored them separately, listening all the while to the music of the Oakland streets. Falling deeper and deeper into her reverie, Nesta changed.

The rooms appeared in her imagination, but they were in every respect real. To the left was a mooring dock above which was suspended her silk and teak and stainless-steel yacht. To the right was a laboratory filled with bubbling bottles and tubes of Pyrex. In this room time passed more quickly to hurry along her experiments.

A mirror appeared at the end of the aisle separating her laboratory and yacht. In the mirror was a taller woman the color of ebony. Her eyes were smaller and extremely white; eyes that seemed to flash when she looked from side to side. Her nose had widened, and her lips were as full as the Nile in the rainy season.

“Nesta.”

Her breasts were still small but a little higher. Her feet were much bigger. For running, she thought.

“Nesta.”

The boat and root plants receded into memory, ready to be called again. She walked into the mirror, merging herself with herself.

“Nesta, girl, did you stay up all night again?”

“No, Grandma, uh-uh,” she said. The sun was up outside the window. “I fell asleep in the chair is all.”

The books had fallen from her lap around her feet. She stood up among them and looked at Felicity Charm. She was tall, like Nesta’s image of herself, but sand-colored instead of black.

“How many books you read?” Felicity asked.

“None.”

“None? When’s the last time you didn’t read even one book at night?”

“I don’t know,” she said, a little distracted. “But I don’t think I’m going to read very much anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I have to talk to people now, Grandma. I have to go out and talk to people. I have to make up my own mind about all this stuff. You know?”

“You mean, you gonna start datin’?”

Nesta had a little more than six thousand dollars in the bank from a dozen years of saving. She bought a used camper and a Dodge truck. Then she traveled out across the country, meeting people and talking.

She collected ideas and people’s expertise. She learned more than a thousand recipes for chili and how to drive a big rig. She learned 38,263 names, more than 9,000 body odors, and well over 500 shades of skin and eye colors.

In college towns she listened to lectures by scientists, men of letters, and artists. She always asked questions, never giving an opinion. She never took notes, nor did she forget a word. The only thing she ever wrote were letters to her grandparents. Long letters that were probably the most important documents on Earth. These letters told of what Nesta thought about the nature of light in the eyes of our science and philosophies.

She took a winding route around the Midwest, North, and South. Then she traveled to the East Coast, covering Maine to Florida in her studies.

After that she sold the camper and truck and went to Europe. There she continued her cataloging. She learned German and French and Italian; she spent a month in the major libraries of each nation. Then she moved on.

She was in Hong Kong, wondering whether or not to go into Vietnam, when one night she had a dream. It was a simple vision. She was seated at the table in the dinette of her grandparents’ home. Off to her left the back door was open. Lythe Charm, her grandfather, was in the doorway, in his wheelchair, basking in the afternoon sun. The light was so strong that his back was enveloped in shadow. There was a ruffled newspaper on the table. A partially obscured headline spoke of murder.

She was with a man named Kai in a small room on a footpath that had no name that she was aware of. She loved being there because all she had to do was to lie on her back, and all the sensations, sounds, and odors of the city came to her. And Kai was a wonderful man who liked to talk while making love. He was asleep, his strong and slender back turned to her.

She sat up and went to the small window. As the gray-red sun rose over the city, she began to think.

Eleven

Hidalgo Quinones drank wine only on Saturday afternoons. He worked six days a week in the gardens of North Berkeley and then he’d stop wherever his last job was, drink a quart of red wine, and take a nap. He always napped in the back of his truck, thinking about his seventeen brothers and sisters, counting how many cousins and nieces and nephews he must have down around Ensenada by now.

“What an Easter festival they must be having,” he said to himself.

He didn’t have any children yet, even though he was already fifty. He did have his little bushes and big trees, his seeded lawns and bright roses. Hildy had a girlfriend named Rosa, but she couldn’t give him children.

But the thought of a hundred relatives fully grown back home made Hildy feel that he didn’t have to make a family too.

“It’s sad for Rosa,” he said to himself. “But it would be even sadder if I left her because she was barren.”

That was when the first shaft of light hit him.

Fertility was on his mind. Fecundity and growth. Huge plants wandering as roots under the ground, then coming forth as giant woody trees headed for the sun — like those astronauts. Cow shit and milling flies, bees and birds and burly clawing bears.

His life was set in fifteen seconds.

And then the second shaft hit.

The landscape so delicately created was blasted from his mind. Trees uprooted from the ground slammed into animals and grafted with them. Volcanoes of blood erupted under the hapless creatures, who immediately caught fire. Hidalgo screamed and clenched his fists.

He dreamed of blood and death under the blue light...

Until the third shaft of light struck.

Some months after the day that blue light struck, dozens of different kinds of birds were gathering in the northernmost reaches of the King Canyon National Park. Stags and wolves, night crawlers and mosquitoes passed that way again and again. They seemed to find comfort on or near the bark of a great sequoia redwood that had grown there for a thousand years.

Along the bark of the tree butterflies of all kinds spread their multicolored wings.

A forest ranger, Esther O’Halloran, was standing next to the great tree, obviously perplexed. She had taken off her brimmed hat to massage her head and ponder. She didn’t know that a bright pair of eyes was watching her wonder.

She tried to frighten a few of the butterflies away, but they barely moved as she waved her gloved hand around their papery wings.

The ranger knelt down to study the ground around the great tree. There were ants milling and caterpillars and walking sticks moving in their long and rigid dance. There were vole holes all along the ground. Spiderwebs were everywhere except on the tree itself. A blurred, furry flash moved quickly across her peripheral vision and she turned, catching sight of the foxtail as it disappeared into the thicket.

She smiled at the fox.

Esther pulled away a few monarchs to place her palm against the bark. She smiled again, tickled by the slight vibrations that sounded out like a kettledrum to the one that watched her.

“You should be more careful out in such a wild place,” the watcher declared.

She turned to see a short man dressed in a one-piece garment that was a patchwork of cloths and furs, metal and wood, and, in places, bone and clay.

“What?” Esther demanded. “What are you doing here?”

The fox darted out of hiding, running straight for the strange man. Arriving at his feet, she started licking his fur boots.

“I was asleep,” the man said. “In the flatbed of a truck. And then I had three dreams, all in a row. The first one was my mother, the second one was my father, and the last one was me.”

The man smiled and walked toward the forest ranger. The fox scuttled along, licking and yipping. The man came to stand before Esther. They were about the same height.

A black-and-gold monarch lit on his red-brown forehead.

“I woke up,” he said to her, the slightest trace of a Mexican accent rising like vapor between his words. “And looked in my pocket. I found a card for driving that had my picture on it and the name Hidalgo Quinones. But that’s not me.”

“Who are you, then?”

“My name,” the man said, watching her eyes, “is Juan Thrombone. Thrombone with an aitch.”

More butterflies landed on Juan’s head and shoulders. He smiled at her.

“What do you mean ‘dangerous’?” Esther asked, taking a step backward.

“Dangerous?”

“That’s what you said.”

“No. I didn’t say dangerous. It is dangerous. Yes, it is. But I didn’t say that, no, I didn’t. I said ‘wild.’ This is a wild place. A place too strong for anyone who cares more about living than they do about what they might find.”

Esther looked closely in the little man’s eyes. Maybe, he thought, she thinks I’m crazy.

A raven flew up, landing on the ground near them.

“You see, this is a strong place,” Juan said. “It’s a very, very strong place, but it is dying. Soon it will be gone. Destroyed. That’s why I’m here.”

The crazy-quilt man reached into a makeshift tarp bag that hung from his shoulder. He opened the bag to show Esther an egg-sized cone that bore the seed of the great tree.

“She wants them to grow, but they will not. Not until the true equations move her. But she called and I came because it is only the forest and I who can live without hunting. But even these seedlings will go off to war one day, I’m afraid,” Juan said. “Until then I will treat them as my children.”

“You can’t take them.”

“Why not?”

“This is government property. I’m a ranger. You can’t take my trees.” While she spoke, Esther watched the Mexican’s eyes. They were black at first but then came to be blue. Bright blue. The kind of bright that glass gets on a sunny windowsill. I have never spoken to her, but I’ve also seen those eyes.

He left her standing there, looking out where he’d been. There were butterflies all over her. White cabbage butterflies on her cheeks and hands. Down her collar. Up under the cuffs of her uniform pants.

Twelve

He never slept more than a few minutes at a time but was rarely tired. He was in constant pain, but that was the least of his discomfort. His lower lip was now a leather flap, and his right eye had a patch instead of a lid. The flesh of his face had been shredded and scarred, but he didn’t spend long enough in the hospital to find out about plastic surgery for his bones and skin.

Miles Barber had gone from detective to freak in an instant, but he didn’t appreciate the change. The last thing Barber remembered was crouching down among the shrubs of Garber Park and hearing a loud scream.

In the hospital the doctors and police told him that he was the victim of a brutal ritual performed in the park by a drug-dealing cult, the Close Congregation. They told him that he’d been butchered and left to die.

Miles Barber didn’t remember getting up that morning, but he knew that there had been no ritual.

“Bullshit,” he said to the doctors.

“Are you crazy?” he asked his old cop friends.

As soon as he was able, ex-Detective Barber checked himself out of the hospital. Family, friends, and physicians tried to stop him. But he didn’t care about health or what people saw when they looked at him. He didn’t care about what they saw, because the images in his mind were so much worse than disfigurement or physical pain.

Gray Man had laid the imprint of death, in the darkest blue imaginable, upon Miles Barber’s soul. I had felt the same thing when Death jostled me, but I had Ordé’s blood to buffer the pain. Barber had nothing but innocence.

He rarely slept, but whenever he let his mind drift he fell into a cold gray swampland of entropy and despair. If he wasn’t careful, he’d drift all the way into a coma. This happened twice while he was in the hospital, and he had to be revived with powerful amphetamines.

But Miles Barber didn’t spend much time daydreaming after leaving the hospital. He tracked down the Close Congregationalists and interviewed every survivor, hoping to find out the devil’s name and address. Because Barber was on a hunt for the evil that destroyed all the hope and heart in him. He had taken it as his mission to kill the man who had touched his soul.

During the months that he shadowed the congregation looking for Mack the Flask, he never paid much attention to our philosophies or beliefs. “Blue light, white elephant, or Christ on a fuckin’ cross,” he once said to me. “It’s all the same nonsense.” But now he understood that what we believed had drawn Gray Man.

While I was hiding in the northern woods, he was gathering almost as much information as I had on blue light, its chosen, its acolytes, and its meaning.

He had taped accounts of most of Ordé’s speeches from these interviews. He had gotten nearly all of the Blues’ names. He wanted to interview one of the chosen, but they had all died or disappeared.

Neither could ex-Detective Barber find another person who had been touched by Death. All the rest who Gray Man had touched, on the day he murdered Ordé, had died in their sleep within the first week of the slaughter. The newspapers called it a virus that drug users got from sharing needles.

When Barber was through with his interviews he had four primary names on his list. There was me because of my close relationship to Ordé and my ramblings about death on the day they took me to jail. There was Claudia Heart (née Aaronfeld, married name, Zimmerman), who had started a commune out in the desert somewhere. There was a man whom no one had ever seen named Winch Fargo. Roberta Garcia remembered Eileen Martel mentioning him, about going to see him in jail. And there was also Gray Man, the devastator. Gray Man was the ultimate goal, the blood clot, the inoperable tumor. Gray Man was a reason to murder. The reason for a man who lived by the law to break that law finally and forever.

Miles Barber was a good detective when he was with the Berkeley Police Department. He was better as a civilian, no longer needing proof or facts or reasonable cause. He carried with him a small thermos full of gasoline and a box of wooden matches. This was because in his interviews he’d learned that he had shot Gray Man, at point-blank range, to no effect. The moment he caught sight of the deceptively diminutive black man with the two fleshy bumps on his face, there would be no need for handcuffs or jail cells, civil rights or judges.

But as good as he was, Miles Barber was grasping at air.

Claudia Heart had repaired to her desert hideaway, taking with her everyone who knew its location. The rest of the Blues, along with me, had vanished completely.

The only lead was a jailbreak. Winch Fargo had escaped from Folsom, with the help of a prison guard. A day or two later the warden, their suspected accomplice, disappeared with his wife and children — leaving no trace.

Ex-Detective Barber went to Folsom but was not admitted even to present his questions. He had to satisfy himself by buying drinks for off-duty prison guards at the Top Tank bar in downtown Represa.

He spent three months and a good deal of his life savings in a flophouse next door to the bar. Over the ensuing weeks he told the prison guards his story — or at least a part of it.

“Yeah,” he’d say with a bitter sigh. “Up there tryin’ to keep the city safe while you got hippies burnin’ their draft cards. They did this to me and nobody even went to jail for it. I’m discharged on disability, but I haven’t even seen the first check yet.”

No one wondered, or at least they didn’t ask, why Barber moved to the town of Represa. The off-duty prison guards accepted the free drinks and humored the freak. He gained their confidence, bided his time. He knew many of the inmates they guarded and told the guards what he knew. They laughed about how stupid some thieves had been and whistled their respect on the magnitude of some unsolved crimes.

It went like that for many weeks before Miles got to buy drinks for the acting warden, Peter Mainhart. Mainhart was just a guard at heart and would never be the permanent warden. That’s why he still stopped by the Top Tank now and again. Because he missed the company of real workingmen. Barber learned this after the second round of drinks. By the fourth rye they were talking about blood and bluity. By the time they had come to the bottom of the bottle, Mainhart confided that the whole case had been turned over to the SIB, the State Investigations Bureau, in Sacramento.

“Goddamned state,” Mainhart said, a little south of sober. “Chief Inspector Bonhomme goes right in there and takes all the records and asks questions up your ass. What the hell does he think it’s like up here? It’s hell, I tell ya, Milo. It’s hell.”

That was twelve minutes past midnight. Ex-Detective Barber was on the 2:42 bus that would make connections to get him into Sacramento by 8:23 the next morning.

“I don’t understand,” Inspector Christian Bonhomme of the SIB said to Miles Barber at 10:44. “You were fired from the Berkeley Police Department?”

“No,” Barber said for the fourth time. “I received a disability discharge after they did this to my face.”

“Who did it?” Lonnie Briggs, Bonhomme’s partner, sergeant, and friend, asked.

The sergeant had a bald head with no eyebrows. Whereas the inspector was tall and gaunt, Briggs was wide and powerfully built.

“The members of the Close Congregation,” Miles said. “You musta read about it. Four people were killed in the park that day.”

The sergeant and the inspector glanced at each other across the desk, but Barber kept cool.

“Yes,” Bonhomme remembered. “The massacre. You were there?”

“I was.”

“Then why weren’t those cult members put on trial? I mean, an eyewitness account from a homicide detective should at least put somebody in front of a judge.”

“I was there but I don’t remember...”

Lonnie Briggs rolled his eyes and sighed.

“I don’t remember, because of this.” Barber pointed at his ruined face. Then he lifted the eye patch, showing the lidless socket that I saw many months later. Just a naked eyeball permanently bloodshot, hardly human, and dazed by the light. Miles lowered the patch and then took out a squeeze bottle of a sanitized solution to put a few drops in an opening at the top of the patch.

“There was trauma to my head,” he told the SIB men. “I was behind some bushes, I heard a scream, and then I woke up in the hospital. But since then I’ve been investigating on my own. I’ve talked to everyone who was there and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened and who was responsible.”

“Who?” Bonhomme asked as he brought a cherry pipe to his lips.

Bonhomme struck a match over the small bowl, and Barber stalled. Instead of answering immediately, he rubbed the excess moisture away from the bottom of the hard leather eye patch with his finger.

Finally the ex-detective said, “They knew what he looked like, but nobody knew his name.”

It was a hot day in Sacramento. The window behind Bonhomme was open, and a large black fly floated noisily into the room. That fly struck fear into Miles Barber. He felt the sweat on his head begin to trickle down behind his ear as he watched the insect hover and then bang its body violently in a vain attempt to escape through the upper panes.

“Where are you staying, Mr. Barber?” Bonhomme asked.

“I just got into town... from Represa.”

The name of the prison town grabbed the attention of both the inspector and his sergeant. But Barber barely noticed because he was watching that woolly fly.

“You were up at the prison?” Briggs asked.

Miles jumped up and slapped the fly right out of the air. The stunned creature bounced against the gray-green wall and fell on Bonhomme’s blotter. Before the fly could recover, Barber smashed it with a powerful open-hand blow.

When he lifted his hand all that was left was a mess of fly fragments and blood.

“I hate flies,” Barber said lamely.

“What were you doing in Represa?”

“Winch Fargo,” Barber replied. “Could you close that window?”

Briggs moved to slide the window shut. “What about Fargo?” Bonhomme asked.

“The woman who died in the massacre, Eileen Martel. She visited Fargo every week up until she was killed. This Fargo had murdered her husband.”

Briggs nodded at Bonhomme.

“What about her?” the inspector asked.

“As far as I can tell,” Barber explained, “she was smuggling in some kind of drug. The cult members told me that there was something wrong with this Fargo, like some kinda nervous disorder, and their leader, William Portman, also known as Ordé, gave Eileen something to give Fargo to keep him calm.”

“Did they say what it was she gave him?” Briggs wanted to know.

“Everything with them is blue light. The Blues, blue light, blue gods. If she brought him anything, it would have been called blue somethin’.”

“Did they ever talk about blood?” Bonhomme asked softly.

Ex-Detective Barber knew, at that moment, that he was back on the inside. All he had to do was choose his words carefully, omit some of the truths as he knew them, and he would have what he wanted.

“Yeah,” Barber said. “That fella Portman was always talkin’ about blood and blue light. He was always talkin’ about how the chosen ones, the Blues, kinda like priests, had different blood. We found four of his followers poisoned with some kind of toxic mixture, which had been combined with blood, in their stomachs.”

“We should try to get a look at those files,” Bonhomme said. “Call down to the Berkeley PD, Lonnie.”

“No need,” the ex-detective said. “I’ve got copies of all the files right here in my suitcase.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir. It was my case. I had taken them home to study them before the massacre.”

Christian Bonhomme put down his pipe and leaned forward on his elbows.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Barber? What do you want from us?”

Miles first took out his squeeze bottle and pressed a few drops down the top of his patch to soothe the naked eye. He reminded himself not to drift into the fear and hatred that was always so near the surface of his feelings. The hatred and fear of the man who had laid down the imprint of death upon his mind. He couldn’t let them suspect the killing he had in store for Gray Man. He’d already gone too far by killing that fly.

“I want...,” he said, “I want the people who did this to me to pay for it.” Barber closed his good eye and saw the afterimage of a gray cloud that always hovered there. “They took everything from me. They made me a freak.”

“And you think your own police department can’t handle the investigation?”

“They have the same files that I do, Inspector. Did they come to you? Did they go up to Folsom?”

“They would if you went to them now.” Bonhomme was trying to sound reasonable, but his eyes were intent.

“Claudia Zimmerman is in the desert somewhere. Lester Foote has disappeared from the Bay Area, along with three minors and a woman who may have Portman’s child. Fargo escaped from jail. There’s nothing the Berkeley police can do.” Barber suddenly felt a wave of calm come over him. He told me, much later, that he realized that it was fate for him and the SIB agents to work together. He was sure that they had no other choice.

“Listen,” he said. “I know these people. Anyone you run across from this cult and I’ll recognize ’em. I know the names and crazy talk. I even understand what they mean. Fargo’s escape has something to do with the killings in Berkeley. Probably somebody from the congregation got to this Robert Halston. I can help you. And if you find out what happened, it will lead to their boss — and that’s the guy I want.”

“I thought you said that Portman was the boss?” Briggs said.

“Uh-uh. I don’t know the big boss’s name, but you better believe that I intend to find out.”

In the weeks that followed, Miles Barber became a fixture at the fourth-floor offices of Christian Bonhomme and Lonnie Briggs. The SIB was completing its first central building at that time, so the bureau was still spread out in individual offices all around Sacramento. So no eyebrows were raised when Miles set up in the receptionist’s space outside Agent Briggs’s office.

Briggs wasn’t bothered, because he divided his time between fieldwork and conferring with Bonhomme in the larger back office.

No one complained about ex-Detective Barber. On the contrary, Bonhomme was very pleased. Not only did Miles take the secretary’s space, he did the secretary’s work. There were dozens of boxes of handwritten files and reports that dated back to the beginning of Bonhomme’s career with the SIB. He was supposed to have typed, classified, and filed each document but never had. Now the new director wanted everything turned into input cards for the new IBM-360. Barber agreed to take on the task. He told Bonhomme that he wanted to look for leads in the Blues case amid the mass of paper. Each morning when Bonhomme came in to work, he found Miles, his one eye scanning a scrawled report that was tacked to the wall, his ten fingers battering the old Royal typewriter. Every evening when the inspector left, Barber was still typing and squinting at the wall.

Bonhomme must have wondered if the one-eyed ex-detective freak was living in the temporary office. But there was no suitcase in the cloak closet or bedding or even a toothbrush to prove it. That was because Miles Barber never slept. He kept his toothbrush in his pocket, stowed his suitcase in a locker at the bus station, and did his latrine with a washrag, a bar of soap, and a ceramic mug. Once a week he took his clothes to a French laundry on Spring.

Barber spent every night working on Bonhomme’s files. He typed and filed, ordered and reordered until the inspector returned. He worked because that kept him from heeding the changes happening on the inside.

Miles Barber, while he pecked and hunted, was going through a metamorphosis. On one hand, he was dying, fading out just as his best friend, Brad Sanders, had after a chest wound at Anzio. But on the other hand, there was a life growing from the inside. This new life was coming out of what he had always known as himself, but it wasn’t him — at least, it didn’t have to be. Barber feared that if he fell asleep for long, he would die and this bean sprout in his heart would take over. So he stayed awake, working, playing the radio, and denying the changes that were trying to take hold.

He went on like that, working twenty-hour days and talking to Bonhomme and Briggs now and then about the Close Congregation and their possible relationship to Fargo. Miles had almost finished with the files when he began to worry that Bonhomme had meant to keep him only till all the work was done.

But the ex-detective had a plan. There had been nothing of interest in the files he copied. He would, instead of working on his typewriter at night, break into the inspector’s active files in the back office. He’d transcribe all the information that had to do with Winch Fargo, so when he was released, he’d be able to shadow the SIB investigation until they led him to his prey.

Then one afternoon Lonnie Briggs returned from a four-day field trip.

“Hey, Patch,” Briggs said to the ex-detective secretary. It was a nickname Briggs was fond of using. It bore no enmity. “How’s the filing coming? You almost finished?”

“Not quite.”

The smile Briggs gave was wide and insincere. At least, that’s what Barber thought. He made up his mind to break into the locked files that night.

Briggs went in to confer with Bonhomme. They talked for a while and then Briggs came out.

“Come on in here a minute, will ya, Milo?”

“What for?”

“Just a couple’a things.”

Miles felt something enter his mind. It wasn’t a thought, but an overwhelming excitement that bordered on fear. He couldn’t explain then that it was a power coming over him, the ability to receive emotional and other, more obscure impressions from people around him.

“Take the hot seat,” Briggs said, indicating the chair before his boss’s desk.

As Miles lowered himself into the chair, Briggs said to Bonhomme, “He’s gonna need a hat.”

“What?” asked Miles.

“A hat,” Briggs repeated. “With a big brim too. I mean, if we’re gonna go out with these crazies in the desert, then we’re gonna have to be inconspicuous. No offense, but it would take a blind man not to notice you.”

Miles Barber laughed. The three deep single-syllable tones that burbled out of his chest were odd enough to arrest the agents’ attention.

“You okay, Barber?” Bonhomme asked. He even put down his pipe in case he needed both hands to lend assistance.

The ex-detective wanted to answer; he tried to. But first he had to figure out what that bullfrog laugh was.

“It was like looking for my long-lost father,” Miles said to me much later next to a campfire. “Instead, I found the devil. But in the back of my mind I was thinking that the devil was my old man. You see what I mean?”

I did get his meaning. That laugh was the annunciation of the new life that had been growing since Grey Redstar’s will had touched Barber’s soul. In that office he was a new man being offered the old man’s obsession. And in that moment the will of the man who should have passed on was soldered onto the detritus of Gray Man’s rage.

“I’m fine, Christian,” Barber said at last.

“You sure? You sounded a little funny.”

“Is this about Fargo?”

Bonhomme winced in a final moment of indecision, but Miles knew that it would pass. He’d soon be on the trail of the man who had killed him and then brought him back to life.

“There’re three avenues of investigation that we could follow,” Bonhomme said a little too loudly. “There’s Fargo. He’s the reason we’re on the case. There’re the guys in the prison that were torturing Fargo. And there’s this guy Halston. He was the guard on duty who disappeared at the same time. The warden, Gerin Reed, is also under investigation, but we’re not sure about his role yet.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Briggs added. “He’s pretty hard to find too.”

“I see,” Miles said. He acted as if he were following the conversation, weighing the options. But he already knew the answers. He already knew what they were going to do.

“I’m interested in that guy Allitar,” Briggs said.

“Who’s that?” Barber asked.

“He’s one of the four guys who kept Fargo tied to a bunk in his cell. Halston had to be helping them, but Allitar was the ringleader.”

“What kind of name is Allitar?”

“It’s an alias.”

“Well, then, what’s his real name?” Barber asked the burly sergeant.

“His father’s name is Brown, a con artist. Took retirement accounts from old ladies starved for love. He went under the alias Conrad L. Allitar for fifteen years. Married under that name. Had kids under that name. Mackie’s legal name is Allitar even though it was just his father’s alias.”

“What’s his story?”

“Allitar is in on a multiple homicide committed during the robbery of a pharmacy,” Bonhomme interjected. “He claims that there was some kind of drug in Fargo’s blood. They used to bleed him for it, he says.”

“To sell it?”

“No, not if you’re to believe him. Fargo sold the drug himself, even though no one but his cellmate, Allitar, knew the source, that’s what Mackie claims. They told everybody that the Martel woman was a mule that smuggled the stuff in.” Bonhomme stopped and stared at Barber for a moment or two.

“Yeah?”

“You told us about this Martel woman independently of Mackie.”

“So what?”

“What do you think it is with this blood stuff?”

“I couldn’t say. They all talk about blue light and blood the way Christians talk about the cross and blood. I don’t know. Did you get any of this stuff that Mackie said Fargo made? Send it down to a chemist?”

A professor of mine used to tell me that a well-placed question is a scholar’s best shield. You could use a question to imply an idea that you had but could not prove. Or you might want to seem open to a line of inquiry that you had no intention of following. Miles’s question was designed to tell Bonhomme that he had no knowledge, no agenda, and a cop’s objectivity about any hocus-pocus that might be presented as fact.

“Yeah, we did,” Lonnie Briggs said when his boss went silent. “Milk and sugar, blood and baking soda. But there’s something else too. Something they can’t analyze. Maybe that’s what the broad brought in.”

“Like a culture or something?” Barber asked.

“Maybe,” Bonhomme replied. “Maybe.”

“Maybe if you let me talk to him, I could make some connection he might have with the people in Berkeley,” Miles offered. He wanted to meet the blood addict. “Or maybe one of the others that helped him bleed Fargo.”

“All dead but Mackie,” Bonhomme said. “He’s dying too. Wasting away. I don’t think you’d get much out of him. Anyway, we couldn’t get you into a penal facility. You don’t have any certification. No. We’ll let the lab worry about the blood. We want you to try and help us trace Bob Halston. We have some information about him and a communal cult in the Haight.”

Thirteen

In the farthest eastern corner of the Mojave Desert is the abandoned Jacobi gold mine. In a subterranean room off the central shaft Winch Fargo sat on a cold stone, laughing. The thrumming in his body told him that it was the right time.

“She’s comin’,” he said to himself, sniggering. “She’s almost here.”

The rocks were cold, and there was only a candle for light and warmth. But that was more than his mother gave him. When she locked him in the closet, when he was a child, there was no candle or room to walk around. There was no promise of somebody coming to love you. No promises at all.

Fargo wore only a loincloth fashioned from a big man’s T-shirt. He was skinny and his nose ran freely, but still he tittered merrily.

“She’s comin’ to get my blood, yes sir. She needs me and I need her. And it’s almost time. Yeah, yeah.”

The thick oaken door groaned as it was pulled open. Fargo leaped to his feet and lunged for the lamplight that appeared. The chain around his left ankle kept him from reaching the door.

Stanley Brussels, recently a carpenter from Indio, fell back as soon as he pulled the door open. He had seen Fargo’s incredible strength before. When Fargo was free to walk among the others, aboveground, he had gone insane, breaking the necks of three of Claudia’s chosen. Claudia Heart had told them that he could somehow sense the men who had most recently been her lovers, that he had to kill any man who had been with her.

“You should stay out of reach,” Stanley told Claudia.

She was standing, shivering and naked, behind her lantern-bearing acolyte.

“Don’t worry, Stan,” she said. “Hurting me is the last thing on his mind.”

Fargo giggled like an insane child.

Claudia Heart entered demurely, carrying a shallow wooden bowl in one hand and an ornamental dagger in the other. Stanley put down his kerosene lantern and pushed the heavy door shut.

“Hi, princess,” Winch said, rising to his knees.

She put down her knife and bowl. “Hello, Winch.”

“How’s the sunlight up there?”

“I could have you tied up and brought up top if you want, honey. You know it hurts me to see you down here so sick and cold.”

“No, no, don’t... don’t take me up there. I couldn’t take it, smellin’ your pussy on all them men.” Fargo stood up suddenly and violently. “Goddammit!”

Claudia rose with him, but not in fear. She drew close to his chest and stroked its long, skinny muscles.

“Shhh, baby. Don’t be like that. Come on, let’s sit. Come on. Yeah, honey. Don’t you think of anything but me right here with you.”

They both sank to their knees in an embrace.

“I want you, princess.”

“You know we’d both get sick if we did that, Winchy.”

“I don’t care. I want you. I need to have you.”

Claudia stroked his skinny, heaving chest and purred, “You will be the father of my children. You will.”

The moan that issued from Winch’s lips would have broken the hardest of hearts. But Claudia simply disengaged from the embrace and lifted her dagger.

“Put out your arm, Winch.”

“But it hurts,” he said, looking as coy as pure evil can.

“Put out your arm now.”

She etched the sixth cross on the underside of Winch’s left forearm. Then she held the bowl below the wound while he massaged out the blood.

“Six times on one side and six on the other,” Claudia chanted. “It’s our own alchemy, father. It is the blood of our children.”

When the bowl was a quarter filled, Claudia rose, saying, “It’s time,” and the door behind her groaned again.

When Winch looked up and saw that she was gone, he laughed loudly and for a long time.

While Claudia Heart and her Special Chosen had gone to the Jacobi mine, her remaining acolytes — men and women — stayed in the commune off Haight Street in San Francisco. They were waiting for Heart’s return, but she had already decided that she was never going back. Her servants had served their purpose; they had already gotten all of her that she would give.

Bonhomme, Barber, and Briggs interviewed many of the depressed followers but found no answers. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help. They would have done anything to find their lost love. They would have turned her in to the police just to see her again.

Now Claudia lived in the former gold mine’s cafeteria with her dog, Max. Her Chosen, originally fifteen virile young men, and Bob Halston, lived in the bunkhouse.

In the cafeteria Claudia Heart cooked up the blood biscuits for her Chosen, only twelve after Winch Fargo’s slaughtering rage.

Claudia spent chaste days gauging her ovulation.

He’d come in wearing a long trench coat, taken off one of his human victims, to cover the blood. He staggered up the stairs and shoved the bloody clothes in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Then he lay back, near death from the harsh shine of Eileen Martel’s final moments.

“She was strong,” Gray Man thought. “The strongest of them all.”

Gray Man had killed all the hard ones. Now it was just the children, the strumpet, the other two women, and some things not human. One, probably a tree, a couple of hundred miles to the south, would wait for him. He’d track down the coyote and the dog last.

And then there was that other one. The one who had somehow gotten their light leaked into his veins. The one Gray Man had divined from Phyllis Yamauchi’s dying blood. The one Gray Man had hoped would give up his masters. Chance. But he was nothing, hardly worth the notice of Death; except that he had brought the girl.

“Alacrity,” Gray Man mouthed in his bed. “I’ve got a real treat for you, child.”

He lay back in Horace LaFontaine’s old room, weakened to the point of real death. Gray Man liked the feeling of being so close to expiration. He wanted to die. He was Death. He almost let the final shade come down on him. Almost let the light out of the box.

But there was the child, Alacrity. The passion he felt for her was beyond anything he’d known, beyond anything Horace LaFontaine had ever experienced. Her life beat so strongly, completely free from human frailty, and as powerful as the moment of death when the struggle is its greatest.

Gray Man wanted her.

But first he had to rest.

He closed his eyes and descended into the depths of death without dying. He sighed deeply and an instant later, when those eyes opened again, Gray Man was gone.

Horace looked around the room, feeling weaker than he could ever remember. Even when he had been dying of cancer, he could lift a finger, moan from the pain. But now all he could do was to look out and see the room he’d died in years before.

It’s like I’m a ghost, he thought. Like I ain’t even here, but I never left.

The sun went down while he lay there in darkness, remembering all the things that he’d done in his wasted life. Then he thought of all the things he hadn’t done. He’d never learned a thing on purpose, never helped a soul without helping himself. He’d never even done a single thing because it was the right thing to do. Even Death, old Gray Man, did what he thought was right. It was right, Death thought, to kill. He risked his own life to achieve his goals.

A knock came on the door.

A voice, probably the girl, Joclyn Kyle. Horace didn’t understand the words.

She must have gone, he thought, probably thinks I’m out prowling around like he does.

Horace tried to lift his arm but was still too weak. He could feel Gray Man’s presence way down in his mind. He knew how drained the devil was and hoped that Gray Man would die. Even his own death would be worth that.

Horace thought of the man he killed in prison. Prescott Jones, a Brooklyn fence. Horace’s best friend, Vinnie the Cat, had gotten the contract from his girlfriend. She told Vinnie and Vinnie told Horace that a man called Beldin Starr needed Prescott Jones silenced before his trial in June. Prescott was going to testify against Starr.

The deal was worth ten thousand dollars and the best lawyer in New York to get on Horace’s appeal, which was botched by the prosecutor but also ill represented by an uncaring public defender.

Horace was on the good-conduct program. He had a lot of places he could go in the prison with his mail wagon. He was in for armed robbery and assault, but he’d never got in trouble once they locked him up.

Prescott had a job in the lower kitchen. He washed the big pots and prepped vegetables and fruits, anything that needed cutting. Usually he had a partner, Willie Josephson, but Horace found out one day that Willie was sick, or pretending to be, and Prescott was alone.

The lower kitchen was a big room with a lot of waist-high counters piled with pots and bags of raw fruits and vegetables. All Horace had to do was to put his canvas cart in a broom closet, squat down in the rear corner, and wait.

Horace, lying there in the dark of his sister’s old house, remembered squatting down on that slimy wooden floor. He could almost smell the insecticide and detergent. The aluminum counters were cold against his arm and cheek. There was a round metal knife sharpener at his feet. The sharpening steel was maybe fifteen inches long and just thick enough. The perfect weapon to crack bone efficiently.

Horace’s heart fluttered when he heard the door open. He reached for his weapon and held his breath. Somewhere in the back of his mind he railed against killing this man. But it was already too late. There was only one way out of that room.

He waited a few minutes and then rose. He couldn’t see Prescott above the pots and pans, so he went down the aisle, looking. In the fourth aisle he saw the small white man. He was squatting down as Horace had done. His back was partly turned, but Horace could still see what he was up to.

Prescott was down on one knee masturbating, making little grunting sounds.

Horace knew what was going on. Prescott had a cellmate and was too shy to be heard enjoying a little jack-off. It was a pleasure to get alone and make some noise, maybe even call out the pinup’s name.

“Oh, yeah!” Prescott moaned.

Then the knife-sharpening rod cracked his skull open.

Horace tried to stop thinking about it. He actually got out of prison and collected $2,500 from Beldin Starr. Starr said that he had used the rest for the lawyer.

Horace didn’t argue about the money. He couldn’t sleep for weeks without thinking about the sound when he cracked open Prescott’s head. He just wanted to spend a few moments with a whore without thinking about Prescott’s last orgasm.

Finally he just wanted his fix. A little brown powder, and he was all right. He was just fine.

“Mr. Redstar,” Joclyn whispered. “Mr. Redstar.”

Horace opened his eyes to see the dark young woman. It was morning, and Horace was happy that he’d awakened in his own body.

“Mr. Redstar, are you okay?”

“My name ain’t Redstar,” the dead man uttered. “Not Redstar. LaFontaine. Horace LaFontaine.”

“That was old Miss Elza’s maiden name,” Joclyn said. “LaFontaine.”

“You knew Elza?”

“She used to own this house and she rented out rooms. She rented to my uncle, but she was already real sad because her husband died and her brother disappeared. My uncle took care’a her and when she died, she left the buildin’ to him.” Joclyn reached out to touch Horace’s tear. “Were you related to her? You know Miss Brown across the street says that you look a lot like Miss Elza’s brother, but she knows that that couldn’t be because he had bad cancer and even though he disappeared, he’d have to be dead by now.”

“I am her brother, Joclyn. But I’m somebody else too.”

“Huh?”

Horace felt stronger in the morning. But the task of telling his story seemed impossible.

“Do you believe in the devil, Joclyn?”

“I don’t know. I guess I do. I mean there sure is a lotta evil, and I cain’t see where it makes no real sense.”

“The devil is in me, girl. He’s in me.” Horace lifted his right hand and tapped the fingertips against his chest. “Right in here.”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded but still looked unconvinced.

“Did you hear about what happened in the park in Berkeley yesterday?” he asked.

“You mean the killin’s?”

“Look in the bottom drawer, honey,” Horace said. “Look in the bottom drawer down there.”

Joclyn went to the dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. She took out the bundle of clothes. Horace turned his head to watch as she unfurled the trench coat. She gasped when she saw the bloody jacket and pants, the shoes covered in dried gore. Then she looked up at him and slowly rerolled the parcel. She stood up with the armful and left without saying another word.

“Mr. Redstar. Are you awake?”

It was night again and Horace felt almost strong enough to sit up. Joclyn was sitting on the bed beside him.

“How are you?” she asked.

All day he had been dozing, coming awake at every sound, expecting the police to come. Horace thought that it would hurt Gray Man’s pride so much to be jailed that he might die, or kill himself, from the humiliation. But they hadn’t come.

“What happened?” he asked the girl.

“I burnt your clothes in the backyard. You don’t have to worry.”

“You what? Why?”

“You were just sick, Mr. Redstar. That’s all. But now you’re okay. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have to be scared. They said on the radio about them killin’s, but nobody knows what really happened. All I know is that you couldn’t have done it. You ain’t even strong enough to pick me up. You just got confused, Mr. Redstar. You just thought you did bad ’cause you was there an’ saw all that blood.” She had taken his hand in both of hers. She had dry hands, working hands.

Horace forgot about Gray Man for the first time since his resurrection. He was thinking that no one had ever loved him outside his mother and sister. He felt a tear run down to his nose. Joclyn, smiling, brushed it off with her hard fingertip.

“I ain’t gonna give you up, Mr. Redstar.”

At that moment Gray Man came awake deep down in Horace’s mind. He rose quickly to the surface, pushing Horace aside.

“Mr. Redstar?” Joclyn asked, seeing a change in his face.

Gray Man sat up and reached out for the girl.

Watch your little toy die, Horace, Gray Man thought. He put his hand on Joclyn’s neck and smiled.

No.

Gray Man’s smile turned to puzzlement.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Redstar?” Joclyn asked.

No.

Gray Man tried to increase his pressure but could not. Horace tried to make him put down his hand, but that too failed.

“Are you okay?” Joclyn wanted to know.

Let her be, devil, Horace cried.

Do you think you can order me?

I think that Joclyn’s a friend and I’ll fuck you up if you thinkin’ ’bout messin’ around. Horace felt his mind inhabiting the same body as Gray Man. He knew that the devil was still weak, still recovering from his fight with the old lady. He was risking his own life by trying to kill the girl.

“I have to go,” Gray Man said to Joclyn.

“But you’re sick.”

“I have to go away for a while. I have to go but I’ll come back soon.” He took his hand away from her throat and smiled. “Go on now, let me get dressed.”

When she had gone Horace let out a shout of life in the chambers of the death master’s mind.

Fourteen

Nesta Vine returned to the Bay Area four days after the massacre in the park. She went back to her grandparents’ house and was met at the front door by a familiar-looking black woman, somewhere in her forties.

“Yes?” the small woman asked of the girl.

“Who are you?” Nesta asked.

“Renee Ferris.”

Renee Ferris, of course, Nesta thought. Renee was from a group of her mother’s cousins who lived down near La Jolla. She hadn’t seen Renee since she was a child. And Renee would never recognize her, because Nesta had become the image in the mirror. Taller and jet black with bigger feet. Her hair had taken on a coarse straw color and her eyes were bright amber. Her face, which was once round and sad, had lengthened and thinned.

“What are you doing here?” Nesta asked Renee.

“Say what, child? Who are you?”

“Oh,” Nesta said, remembering herself. “I’m sorry, ma’am. My name is Ebony, Nesta’s friend from Back East.”

“Oh. Oh.” Mrs. Ferris looked down the stairs and then up the street. “Is Nesta here?”

“No, ma’am. The last I heard from her she was in Korea. But she said that if I ever came to Oakland, I should look up her grandma and granddad,” the tall woman said.

Renee Ferris looked unaware into her cousin’s face and said, “My auntie, Mrs. Charm, died six months ago.”

Nesta couldn’t keep the tears out of her eyes. “What happened?”

“She was just old, child,” the cousin said. She put out her hand and touched the dark-skinned girl’s forearm. “Why don’t you come in for a while and rest.”

The house seemed smaller but smelled the same. Nesta walked in past the staircase, into the living room, where her grandfather sat in his pitted chrome wheelchair. He was looking out the window at the hummingbird feeder on the back porch.

Nesta saw the pair of green hummingbirds taking turns at the honey water spout. She knew their approximate weight in milligrams and the rate of speed at which their wings fluttered. But all she cared about was her grandfather’s eyes on them.

“Uncle,” Renee Ferris said. “This here is one of Nesta’s friends — Ebony.”

Lythe Charm had been an old man as far back as Nesta could remember. But his face was always like a child’s, inquisitive and ready to laugh. Now even his eyes were old and sad. Nesta thought of a senior citizens home she worked in for a few weeks outside of Boulder, Colorado. She worked there while attending a series of lectures on Shakespeare that were being given at the university.

The lectures were nothing compared to watching, hearing, and smelling the ever encroaching specter of death among the aged.

She’d sat one evening with an old woman dying from collapsing veins. Nesta was telling her a story that she’d heard in Selma, Alabama. A story about an Indian down there who, centuries before, had first brought snakes to the territory. It was a wild tale of stealth and intrigue, but in the end everything worked out all right. The snake found his hole near a cultivated field, and all the deer and rabbits steered clear from then on.

Somewhere during the story the old woman died. Nesta felt it like a sudden vacuum in the room. Somewhere things felt empty, and Nesta realized how much space the human soul inhabited.

She could feel the sadness in her grandfather’s soul.

“Hello, Mr. Charm,” Nesta said.

“You know my baby?” he asked, looking hard at the tall and beautiful woman.

“We traveled together around a whole lot of the world,” Nesta said. “I got to know her pretty well.”

“Where is she now?”

“In Korea,” Nesta lied, and then sat down on the corner of the sofa nearest her grandfather. “She told me a lot about you.”

“Oh?” The old man smiled. “What she say?”

“She talked about how much you liked blackberry tea—”

“I sure do.”

“— and about how when you were younger you drove two hundred and forty-six cattle across Texas on horseback and how you didn’t lose one of them.”

“She remembered that, huh?”

“She told me all about you, Mr. Charm. She told me a story to tell you when we saw each other. A story that she heard in Alabama.”

Lythe Charm smiled with broad anticipation, “And what story was that?”

“Excuse me, Ebony,” Renee said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is that little bag your suitcase?” She was referring to the beat-up leather bag, the size of a school satchel, that the young woman carried with her.

“Yes, ma’am. I just got into town. I was going to find a Y to stay at, but I wanted to drop by here and say hello first.”

“Well, you take that bag upstairs and put it in the third room on the right. That’s Nesta’s room. You put it down up there and clean up, and I’ll make us all some supper.”

“But I wanna hear Nesta’s story she sent me,” Lythe Charm complained.

“Don’t worry, Uncle,” said the dutiful and dour Renee Ferris. “Ebony’ll spend the night and tell us everything about your girl.”

“Was it a planet?” Lythe Charm asked the young woman who called herself Ebony.

“No, no, that’s not what they called it,” she answered. “It was more like a giant stone that was once alive but then became the home to its own children.”

“Like a shell,” he said.

“Yes.”

The black woman’s smile was brilliant and white. She had been telling Lythe Charm a story that she said she’d learned from his granddaughter who had, in turn, learned it from a little-known tribe of American Indians called the ArShoni. The story Nesta was telling was a fragment of the creation story that she had inherited from the blue light that infused her with knowledge and power.

“... for more years than man can count,” Nesta continued, “bright forms of life that were like animals and flowers and insects and fish all in one grew out of the ground and bathed in the light of a rainbow-colored star—”

“Were they on a planet then or was that on the big rock?” Lythe Charm asked, hungry for the words of his long-gone granddaughter.

“That was on the planet, before things changed,” Nesta said. “The life-forms grew and intermingled and multiplied and changed. Because on this planet the fish and beasts could speak and mate; all life there was equal and respectful.”

“What did they eat?” the old man asked slyly. “If they all respected each other, even the flowers and the trees, then what could they eat?”

“They lived on the light from the rainbow star,” the young woman said. “The radiant energy of the star fed them. And for eons they grew and multiplied and changed. After many millions of years they began to fly and grow higher and higher until some had completely left the planet and flew closer and closer to the sun, looking for more and more energy because the great joy among these far-off folk was to bathe in the light of the sun and to grow.

“These great flying beasts had within them chambers of quartz that stored light in patterns that held all of the wisdom of all the life-forms that were once planet-bound. Then they began to multiply by placing the seed of their physical being on lifeless chunks of matter in space and then bathing those seeds with the light from within their deep quartz caverns.”

“And why was that?” Lythe Charm asked. He was feeling younger and stronger just talking to the strange-looking woman. There was something about her that was familiar, but Lythe couldn’t seem to put his finger on it. “Why would they have to shine light on their own seeds if there was a sun still shining?”

“Because their light contained memories and instructions on how to grow. The seeds had the power of life, but in the light was their souls’ purpose.”

“Kinda like Sunday school in a flashlight, huh?” Lythe asked.

“A little bit. But as time went by, the space creatures got larger and larger. Soon they were as big as moons and there were millions of them. They absorbed all the energy of the star and then floated out toward new stars. By then they were as large as planets. Their hard external shells covered mighty engines that they had for both their heart and brain. Millions of years passed, and the planets of life spread out across the universe. And as they moved, now and again, they would deposit their seed on likely-looking planets. Emanating—”

“Say what?” Lythe Charm, whose eyes were looking younger, asked.

“Emanating. That means ‘coming out from.’ ”

“Oh, yeah. Uh-huh, I see.”

“Anyway, emanating from the seed was a soft music, and if another of their celestial brethren would pass by, they would hear it and shine their light where the seed had fallen. That way, information and life could pass between the stars and new life could evolve.”

“But what if the seed was dropped, but nobody heard the signal and no light came?” Lythe asked. She could tell that he didn’t believe a word of the story but loved hearing it. It was just as if Nesta had never gone, as if she were still there telling him about what she had learned in her late-night reading.

“We are the seeds, Mr. Charm,” Nesta/Ebony said. “Just seeds waiting for water in order to grow.”

“You mean, we aren’t the top ones in the animal world?” the old man asked. He seemed a little sad.

“No, Gramp,” she said softly. “We’re just empty husks, like, waiting for the light of life to enter us.”

“You are my little girl, aren’t you?”

“I love you,” she said. Then she bit hard into her bottom lip and kissed her mother’s father in a way that he had not been kissed in many years.

Fifteen

The view from the mountaintop was all that Gerin Reed ever wanted. Whenever his eyes chanced upon the deep blue Pacific or down the steep valley of pines, he stopped whatever he was doing, forgot where he was going to, and stared — sometimes for up to an hour. Many things distracted him. His children making up games based on how fast they could run or how well they could remember, the bottle of urine rotting and congealing on the back porch, the static between stations on the radio.

Karen had gone down with the children to Jason and Bridgette Sandler’s place. The Sandlers were their closest neighbors, two miles distant. Jason worked for a lumber company, and Bridgette took care of their kids. Gerin had seen his wife and Jason in the woods together. He knew that he couldn’t satisfy her needs and didn’t mind too much. All he wanted from her was her company and her laughter with the children. Sometimes he would wake up in the night and watch her sleeping. He once counted 3,700 of her breaths.

Aspiration, he thought while she slept, maybe dreaming of her lover down the hill.

Gerin had a slender paperback book in his pocket, The Prince by Machiavelli. The ideas didn’t mean much to him, but the words being read out loud made a kind of music that Gerin liked to set free in the forest.

He sang out in the woods, hoping for an echo. He wanted to hear something. Something that vibrated in his own heart and mind. He felt like a child in those woods, sure that there were other children laughing and playing there too. But they were hiding from him. It was a cruel game of hide-and-seek but Gerin never lost his hopeful heart. He knew that they would come out for him someday.

He could hear a car coming up the dirt road. Gerin worried that it might be Bridgette. Sometimes she came up to seduce him while Jason and Karen took care of the kids. She liked to go skinny-dipping, pretended that it was innocent enough, that she and her husband did it with people all the time. Gerin did what she asked but was continually distracted by cloud patterns wrapped in the ripples of the pond. He liked to look at Bridgette’s round belly and swirling pubic hair, but he was never aroused.

Karen never excited him either. It wasn’t that he didn’t want sex. He sometimes woke up having powerful orgasms, dreaming of a woman who, while they were in the act of lovemaking, would talk to him about her shopping that day, the smell of tomato leaves and the thunk of ripe melons.

The car came into sight. It wasn’t the Sandlers’ Jeep. It was a tan-colored Chevrolet. Three men in hats sat inside.

The sedan came right up to the front door of the log cabin that Gerin had bought with his life savings.

“Warden Reed?” the gaunt pipe smoker asked.

“Yes?”

The driver was shorter than the pipe smoker but looked bigger owing to his swollen muscles and big gut. The third man wore a wide-brimmed hat that hung down a little like a Mexican sombrero. But Gerin could still make out the red scars on the stranger’s face.

“I’m Inspector Bonhomme from the State Investigations Bureau, sir,” the pipe smoker said. “This is Sergeant Lonnie Briggs and Miles Barber, uh, our assistant.”

“Hello.”

“Your wife has already agreed to come with us, Warden Reed. She claims that you’ve been keeping her and the children against their will up here. The Sandlers contacted us for her.”

“I’m under arrest?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For what? I haven’t done anything.”

“That’s not what your wife says.”

“She could have left. I didn’t stop her from going down to Jason and Bridgette’s. She could have just kept on going.”

Lonnie Briggs shrugged his big shoulders even though the plea had been addressed to his superior.

“She says that you used psychological cruelty to keep her and the kids up here,” Bonhomme said. “She said that she was afraid of you coming after her and killing the whole family.”

Gerin Reed looked at the bluish smoke issuing from the agent’s lips. He wondered whether it was true. Was he crazy? Was he ready to kill Karen and little Jason and Anne-Marie? Was he insane?

He remembered Karen complaining that the money was running out. She’d asked him how they would survive if there was no money.

Was that crazy?

Gerry had thought that he could ask Jason about a job in the logging camp down in the valley. He’d been a cook in the Pacific Theater. He’d killed men in the war. He’d killed children too. But all that was before he’d been wounded and been made a cook.

At that moment Gerin saw Miles Barber assessing him. There was neither sympathy nor accusation in that one hard eye, simply the desire to know.

“Warden Reed?” Christian Bonhomme asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”

“Are you taking me to prison?”

“No, sir, I’m not. But we need to have some questions answered and you’re a hard man to find.”

From all accounts Claudia prepared the sweet oils herself. She used store-bought extracts of cinnamon, almonds, rose petals, and vanilla to scent them. The oils, which came from cottonseed mainly, were heated to body temperature and placed around the room in wooden bowls. The walls and ceiling were draped with deep red cloths. Every corner housed a cluster of a hundred or more lit candles. In the center of the room was a pile of mattresses decorated with silken blankets, sheets, and pillows. Naked, Claudia Heart reclined in the middle of the mattresses and silk. Max the dog stalked the perimeter while her Special Chosen surrounded her. They were also naked and, to a man, erect. Each one had greased himself with the warm oils and now waited, listening to a song that had no words or sound. The music emanating from deep within their love goddess.

She leered with anticipation at their lust.

“Sing to me,” she said loudly. “Sing to me.”

Lonnie Briggs got that on his tape recorder. He and Miles Barber, backed up by eighteen state troopers, watched through an obscure window.

“We gotta wait until they do somethin’ illegal,” Briggs whispered to Barber. “Otherwise, the goddamned lawyers’ll get the arrest and everything we seize thrown outta court.”

But Barber thought that it was the spectacle of all that sexuality that had arrested the SIB sergeant’s attention. After all, the SIB usually went after less flamboyant suspects. The rare case of police corruption, construction scams against the state of California, or some bureaucrat using state resources illegally — these were Briggs and Bonhomme’s staples.

Barber also felt something from the naked woman. Whatever it was felt raspy and unpleasant on his sinuses and eye.

It was Barber who brought them to this abandoned mine. He used her husband’s name to do a tide search on desert properties. William Zimmerman had put a down payment of $175,000 on the played-out Jacobi mine in the eastern Mojave Desert.

Claudia Heart’s Special Chosen let out groans and guttural pleas. They begged and demanded. They stroked themselves and posed.

At first she called forth a small Asian man who sported an exceptionally wide erection. She made him lie beneath her and rode him while Max bit hard into the flesh of his thighs and arms.

The next lover was a tall and virile Mexican man. She was happy simply to swallow his sperm.

The next three men approached at the same time.

Max’s eyes flashed as he moved among the Chosen and howled. Claudia wailed with him.

Lonnie Briggs was breathing heavily. The uniformed state troopers, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room, were beginning to get restless. Miles Barber was wondering why he didn’t seem to care about sex or even if there was a crime being committed.

Then a man skulked into the room. He was different from the rest, inasmuch as he was fully dressed. But Barber could see that he too was greatly aroused by the woman. He avoided Claudia’s line of vision. Barber knew somehow that he was breaking Heart’s command, that he just needed to see her.

“Hey, Briggs,” Barber said.

“What?” the state agent answered in a husky voice.

“Ain’t that one in the pants Halston?”

Lonnie Briggs broke into the room with his uniformed state police force. The prone woman, barely larger than a girl, looked up and shouted, “Stop them!”

Briggs and his men found themselves set upon by twelve naked men.

“I was talking to the police, Inspector,” Claudia Heart-Zimmerman said to Christian Bonhomme.

He had been feeling a little light-headed ever since he’d entered the interrogation room with the suspect.

“You ordered your followers to attack Sergeant Briggs and his men, Mrs. Zimmerman,” the inspector replied.

“No. No, not at all.” The love goddess smiled. “I was yelling for your sergeant to stop them from raping me. They’d been raping me for weeks, you know.”

Claudia peered intently at Bonhomme, and he felt a vague pang of fear.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what you say. But Mr. Briggs calls it murder. He says that you ordered your men to fight to the death. The police officers were forced to respond with deadly force...”

It had been in papers all around the country, STATE POLICE FORCE ASSAILED BY NAKED ZOMBIES OF LOVE. Four of Claudia’s acolytes had been shot to death. Five others fought so hard against arrest that they were killed, or died later, from wounds they received while being subdued. The survivors were now locked up in a medical facility in San Francisco, suffering from some disease or withdrawal and committed to their escape and reunion with their queen. Claudia Heart and Robert Halston were arraigned in absentia because of the wounds they sustained.

Halston was subdued in the cafeteria. Claudia had run out into the desert with a dog. When the police approached her she fell, hitting her head on a stone.

She was captured, but the dog, after biting three policemen — who now were hospitalized with undiagnosed ailments — had been too fast for the law.

“I am innocent, Inspector,” Claudia said with a shrug, staring intently at the wavering Bonhomme. He noticed the sweat on her forehead.

“You are not, Mrs. Zimmerman.”

“Call me Claudia Heart,” she commanded.

“I don’t know what power it is that you think you have over men, Mrs. Zimmerman. But I am going to have you up on charges of assault and murder.” Inspector Bonhomme turned quickly and went through the interrogation-room door. He knew that if the woman had stood up and approached him, he would have gladly let her go.

“Should I have her transferred to a holding cell, Christian?” Lonnie Briggs asked.

“No. No. Leave her right where she is. Open that door only to bring her meals. Don’t talk to her. You hear me, Briggs? Don’t say a word to her.”

“Yes, sir.”

After snapping his ankle chain, Winch Fargo slammed his hard and skinny body against the ironbound door in the darkness. No one heard the dull thudding deep under the desert floor.

Sixteen

Gray Man walked through the towering forest, unconcerned with the beauty of the redwoods, unconvinced by their grandeur. His leather dress shoes were broken, his black jacket torn. Gray Man’s clothes were spattered with mud, but he didn’t care. He was waging a war in his mind with Horace LaFontaine, the first soul he’d ever met that he could not easily destroy.

He’d built Horace out of leftover memories, scraps of a wasted life in the shell of a body that had died. The persona, a loose association of thoughts, had been useful when Gray Man wanted to understand what humanity demanded of its citizens. Humanity — like rutting shrimp in a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. Humanity — globs of self-referential fats and amino acids that couldn’t know the source of existence even if they were spoon-fed that knowledge in the lap of their own pitiful God.

Horace was a perfect example of this primitive life-form. He’d absorbed the inaccurate language, shared the mindless lusts. He was seen as nothing even among the useless, and still his will had stymied the great Gray Man.

Grey Redstar, the Gray Man, the reaper of lost light. The one creature destined to cleanse the soul of its body. The harbinger of a newer and higher form of being.

But as powerful as he was, he could not stop the disease within him, this vague alliance of memories attached around the name Horace LaFontaine.

He’d crucified Horace, stripped his flesh down to the bone and crushed out the cells that remembered him. But every time, Horace had risen out of the depths of Death’s mind — whole again, though broken and afraid.

“Please let me alone,” Horace cried.

“Then die,” Gray Man answered. “Let your life stop and leave me to accomplish my own ends.”

“I cain’t die,” Horace cried. “I mean, I keep comin’ back. I don’t know why. I’m sorry. But if you leave Joclyn be, I won’t have to fight wit’ you no more.”

“You would threaten me?”

“I cain’t he’p it, man. I cain’t. It didn’t bother me when you kilt all them other ones. But I like Joclyn, and whenever she’s around, I just come up in your mind, like. An’ even if you wanna do sumpin’ bad to ’er, I still like ’er an’ don’t want that.”

Gray Man screamed in his mind, and for a moment Horace faded out of existence. But he was still there, there in the fabric of cells and light. Horace LaFontaine was like a mutating virus that had lodged itself deep in the cells of the god of death. The only cure would be to divest himself of the body and release the beautiful deep blue light into the heavens.

In the yawning space between earth and sky and the bright sun, she had stood for 734,906 mornings. From a sapling bole to branchling finger. From a straining prayer for light to the crashing death of her mother. And then that straight run upward and outward. Not even the black bear’s raking claws could stop her. Not gnawing worms or lightning bolts or shifting soft earth could hinder her stretching, yearning ascent...

... and then the different light, knifing down on her needles and sinking below the bark. Not for a year did she even feel it. Not for three did she know that she knew anything, and then she knew more than even the longevity of trees can witness. The tickling wings of butterflies and the nuzzling snouts of deer and lion and rat. She felt and knew the scrabbling claws of birds in her branches and among her leaves.

And then there was the sun shining. The pulsing story of creation humming again and again through her inner timber. So beautiful that it called a song from her depths, a song that flowed out through the atmosphere and deep into the soil and stone of the earth. She was calling to awareness the very atoms that composed the world. She purred and rumbled out the song of awakening that only a patient tree could know. She called and counted butterflies; she bathed in morning fogs and knew her sisters even though they were still unconscious as she was on the day before the light.

She reached down farther in the earth and stretched her leaves upward. Her seed fell barren to the ground, and she knew that she was merely a beacon. I say that she knew, but it was not knowledge as we hold it. The green cell is the engine in plants where blue light is purely mind. And blue light is knowledge, the truth before it is warped by perception of eyes and solitary minds. Plants, and some simple animals, are best suited for holding and sharing the light.

The unity of living flesh and divine light is still more a dream than reality. The light strains to reach the flesh that stretches toward it. But they are not yet one, not even for that woody giant. To reproduce herself, then, she could only sing, waiting for a mate to come. Waiting for the moment when she reached maturity.

He approached the ancient tree with no more concern than a woodsman.

“What are you doing here?” Esther the park ranger asked Gray Man. She’d just come from around the tree and was startled by the appearance of the hobo.

Ever since the day she came awake before the great tree, covered in butterflies, with the memory of those bright blue eyes in hers, she came to visit the tree at least once a week. She came to listen to a nearly subliminal thrumming and to watch the wild animals that came in almost religious obeisance. There is magic near that tree, that’s what the ranger thought.

Gray Man ignored her question, craning his neck to see the full height of the towering column.

“Excuse me, sir, but I’m doing research in this area and it’s off-limits to visitors. If you want to see trees, you have to stay on the paths as they are marked.”

Gray Man raised his hands and laughed. Sparks leaped from his fingertips.

“What are you doing?” Esther asked in a trembling voice.

Somewhere inside the tree the trembling was echoed, though not in fear.

Gray Man’s laugh died at the challenge, and suddenly Horace came back to life. He could see what Gray Man was doing, but he had no power to stop him. He had no desire to save a dumb tree.

“Stop it!” cried Esther O’Halloran as she ran at Gray Man with a dead branch for her club.

The electrical shock was enough to shatter the branch and throw the woman down a small incline into a stream. Gray Man gazed upon her with anger that he’d not felt toward a human before. But he was upset, upset by Horace LaFontaine.

Horace looked at the woman and thought, Fool, why you wanna go messin’ ’round and gettin’ yourself kilt like that anyway? I don’t wanna see you die, but I ain’t gettin’ skinned alive again just ’cause you a fool.

The timber of the redwood groaned, and Gray Man knew that this frail being meant something to the tree. He smiled at the possibility of inflicting pain before death and turned toward the park ranger. Her eyes were rolled up into her head, but still she struggled to rise.

Horace watched with fatalistic fascination. He was less than a ghost, no more than a common cold to his demonic host, and he, in his powerlessness, didn’t feel much for the doomed woman. But then the groaning of the tree became louder and more strident. The ground began to tremble. Esther O’Halloran, who had risen upon unsteady feet, danced away while trying to keep upright.

Gray Man and Horace turned to the tree just as it exploded in a shower of splinters and bright blue light.

Horace, fully aware, felt the brunt of the explosion and then ran down a dark asphalt alley under a heavy downpour. Blue streetlights were placed at uneven intervals down the lane. He ran into walls and trash cans and old rotted fences. He fell and stumbled back to his feet, ran and collapsed, all the while followed by the silent specter of pain. It came after him like a flood of thick blood. He ran and fell tumbling right out of Gray Man’s life.

But Gray Man didn’t see Horace go. He was running himself. The splinters and timbers didn’t hurt him, but the light of the life of that tree went down to his marrow. He caught fire from the vitality and sanctity of the tree. And all he could do was run with the curse of the tree etched deeply on his soul.

Beneath the desert, at the same moment of the explosion, Winch Fargo’s door broke open. Wild-eyed and impossibly skinny, the black-toothed felon staggered up the mine shaft into the clear desert twilight. As he climbed to the surface, the sun disappeared and the stars slowly winked to life. Thousands and thousands of stars. Each one, he knew, like a flower for the honey bee gods who left him here long before there was time or love.

Winch Fargo sought her in the air. There was a trace and a direction — and many fewer steps ahead than there were years behind.

Seventeen

After two weeks Christian Bonhomme decided it was time for him to enter Claudia Zimmerman’s cell again. This was no light decision. He had put it off until the day before the inquest. The only men that had been allowed in to see her were Miles Barber and Felton Meyers, the ex-detective and the court-appointed attorney. And Felton was thoroughly searched before he was allowed into her cell. She fired Felton after their first meeting, however, and spent the next two weeks alone.

Bonhomme was not a religious man, nor did he believe in magic or voodoo or any other such nonsense. But he had seen the depraved survivors of the zombie sex camp. One man, a carpenter named Stanley Brussels, stayed on his knees begging from the time he awoke to the moment he collapsed into sleep. He had to be force-fed through a rubber tube the hospital attendants shoved down his nostril once a day. Others mutilated themselves or became so violent that they were restrained twenty-four hours a day.

Each man wanted only one thing: to see Claudia Zimmerman, to be put in a cell near hers. They begged and cajoled and threatened.

“If that’s what you call love,” he’d said to Briggs and Barber the day he was to go into Claudia’s cell, “then you can have it.”

He wasn’t the same man that Barber remembered. Outside the detention room Bonhomme stalled, clenching his pipe between visible teeth.

“Did you ask the judge for an extension?” Bonhomme asked Lonnie Briggs.

“You know I did, Chris. They said that they have to see her for the indictment as soon as she’s sitting up straight. I don’t know what’ll happen if they find out that she hasn’t seen a doctor.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Bonhomme said through his pipe. “Is Clemmens out there?”

“I told you he was.”

“Then go get him, I guess.”

When the sergeant went through the door Bonhomme was left with Barber and a guard in a special detention wing of the Sacramento jail.

“She scares you, huh?” Barber asked softly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I never felt anything like it. Nothing. It was like pure sex. I went home and my wife, she... well, she went to visit her mother after two nights with me. I was all over her. I couldn’t help myself.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know it doesn’t. I’m no sex maniac.”

“No, not that,” Barber said. “Everybody we interviewed about Zimmerman said that her effect was to make them love only her. No one in the Haight slept with anyone but her — if she allowed it.”

“What are you talking about?” Bonhomme was angry. “Some kinda hocus-pocus? I don’t think the woman has some kinda power. What happened to me was what you call suggestion. All this talk about sex and perverts brought on a sorta temporary anxiety, that’s all.”

“Then why’re you scared to go in there?”

“I’m not scared. I’m just waiting for Briggs to bring Clemmens.”

Miles allowed the lie to go unchallenged. He knew that the small woman had power. He felt her presence, but not like other men did. There was something obscene in his experience. He didn’t hear a silent siren’s call. The dark place in his heart responded with distaste and anger.

After a few minutes Lonnie Briggs returned with George Clemmens. Clemmens was tall and heavy, Barber once told me, with loose flesh that fit him like a suit a size or two too large. He also had big shiny eyes and nearly no chin.

“Okay, Lonnie,” Bonhomme said. “Let’s stop acting like kids and get this thing over with.”

Lonnie Briggs pulled open the door with a solemnity that made him blush. George Clemmens, who was the state prosecutor, looked from one agent to the other with an uncomprehending frown on his face.

Barber was introduced as a special consultant on the case.

“What’s wrong with you guys?” George asked. “You act like you got an armed and dangerous in there. I mean, you know this is late for me to be talking to someone we’re about to indict.”

“You trust me, George?” Bonhomme asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I guess.”

“Then hold on to your hat and don’t touch her, no matter what you do.”

Claudia was sitting on a three-legged wooden stool, her legs crossed and lips red. Her skirt was hiked up to her thigh, and she was smiling.

There was the look of hunger in her small eyes.

Miles found that his distaste had grown nearly into hatred.

“Claudia Zimmerman,” the prosecutor said.

“Claudia Heart,” she purred.

“You know you should have a lawyer present. These are serious charges you are facing.”

Bonhomme and Briggs watched the prosecutor closely.

“I don’t need a lawyer, Mr. Clemmens,” Claudia replied. “And if there are too many people in the room at the same time, I sometimes lose my concentration.”

A dog howled outside. Claudia looked up with the light of recognition in her face and smiled.

“All you have to concentrate on are the concerns at hand, Mrs. Zimmerman,” George Clemmens said. “We would like to know how you plead to the charges, if charges are brought, and it would be better if you had a lawyer on hand to do that for you.”

“I don’t plead to anyone.” The love goddess tossed her limp brown hair back out of her face.

“Has your attorney explained to you the charges?”

“What color are your eyes, Detective Bonhomme?” Claudia asked.

Later the inspector told Barber and Briggs that he was surprised not by the question but by the simple fact of how plain she was. “Just a plain-looking woman in her thirties. Not ugly exactly, but homely, unattractive, you know?”

“Answer the questions, honey,” Bonhomme said with the harshest tone he could muster. “You’re going to be indicted tomorrow for second-degree manslaughter and inciting to riot.”

His manner struck Claudia as if it were a bucket full of ice. She got up from the stool and went into her little water closet, half closing the door behind her. The men could hear the retching grunts and then the toilet flushing. A few minutes later Claudia came out of the stall pale and uncertain.

“Has she been seen by a doctor?” George Clemmens asked the agents.

Neither Briggs nor Bonhomme would answer.

“Have you seen a doctor?” the prosecutor asked Claudia.

Claudia went from nausea to a bright smile in an instant.

“Of course,” she said, not to Clemmens’s question. “I’m pregnant, and all the power has gone to nourish them.”

“Excuse me?”

“Leave me,” Claudia commanded, a goddess again. “I must rest.”

“Mrs. Zimmerman—” George Clemmens said.

“Leave me.”

“Come on, George.” Bonhomme patted the lawyer on the back. He was smiling. “Let’s leave her to boil in her own soup.”

The indictment was easy to obtain. Claudia Heart refused to recognize the court or to speak to the attorney that the court appointed. She didn’t mind the jail cell or the green-and-white striped dress she was given to wear.

George Clemmens asked for an extension to prepare his case and was granted six weeks. In the meantime, Bonhomme and Briggs plotted with ex-Detective Barber to find the whereabouts of Winch Fargo.

Gerin Reed was already under arrest and being held on various charges, including the unlawful detainment of his wife. Robert Halston also awaited trial. Bonhomme had Mackie Allitar transferred from the prison infirmary, where he was dying, to a secured room in the city hospital in Sacramento.

“It was all me by then, Chance,” Miles Barber said. “That bitch had scared all of them. The men that had been her studs were dying. All of Allitar’s friends were already dead. All they had left was Allitar, Reed, Heart, and Halston. They had them together for a trial that would never be, but I knew that Gray Man would be there if Heart was. I knew it.”

He sounded like a good cop on the trail of an exceptionally hard-to-catch crook. But the sweat on his face and the glaze on his one eye told me that all he’d really felt was fear. He was compelled to hunt. Compelled by his previous life. He couldn’t help himself, and so he created a lie and a false faith. He had convinced himself that he could conquer Death — but somewhere, just below the surface, he knew that it was all a lie.

Miles Barber fooled himself that he was the puppet master, that the forces brought together were working for him. But much more than he knew was to unfold.

Nesta Vine had read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Claudia Zimmerman and her arrest. Even though the journalist, or her editor, played down the power that Zimmerman’s followers claimed she had, Nesta felt something from the article, from the words that were missing. She went to visit the lovelorn remnants of the commune in the Haight. The empty structure, which was once a small appliance store, was filthier than the worst crash pad or drug den. The members at first glance seemed as if they might be related. But it was the glassy eyes and emaciated bodies that made them kindred. They lived on corn bread mix and beer. Not one of them ever ventured farther than the supermarket. They didn’t bathe or groom, speak or dream. All they did was huddle together in threes and fours in the low, dark room.

“What’s wrong with you?” Nesta asked a small cluster of forlorn lovers.

“Just sad,” one of them said.

“We’ll be better soon,” another added.

One doe-eyed and acned acolyte looked up and said, “She said that we had to wait until she came back. But that means she’s comin’ back, don’t it?”

On the upper floor Nesta found three bodies that had been piled in a closet. It was the closest thing to a burial that the love cult members could muster.

“They’re dead.” The woman’s voice startled Nesta.

“Who are you?” Nesta asked, addressing the darkness of the larger room.

A young woman came from the gloom. Her large eyes and slender form marked her as a member of the cult, but she seemed to have more life to her.

“I’m Trini.” The girl spoke clearly but slowly.

“What happened here?”

“Without Miss Heart they don’t wanna live,” Trini said. “She was all they wanted and now she’s gone.”

“Why didn’t the reporter write about this? Why haven’t the police come?” Nesta found her humanity pulsing in the wake of this destructive blue light.

“They been gettin’ worse. At first they was just sad, but now it got worse and they started to die.” Trini was a white girl. Nesta classified her accent as coming from Tennessee.

“Why aren’t you sad, Trini?”

“I am. Just not so sad. She balled all’a them. But she said that I was her special girl ’cause’a how it was when I was a girl back home. I crashed here with my boyfriend, Lloyd. He’s in there.” Trini looked at the six bare feet sticking out of the closet door. “But she liked me. Every morning she’d give me a French kiss and I’d follah her just like a dog. And when she left I was sad, but not like everybody else.”

Nesta was sure then that the woman who’d abandoned the commune was her sister in blue light. The notion disgusted her.

“Come with me, Trini.”

“Where to?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Okay.”

Miles Barber thought that he was pulling the strings when he was no more than a tick grasping on to a lion’s mane.

Eighteen

The deficient Blue, the dog, and Death all converged on the state capitol for their own special reasons.

Gray Man bit on a bath towel in the Transient Hotel, eleven blocks from the state building where the prisoners were being held. The fires still burned in him, pained him. Redwood had transferred into his fiber all her placid memories of water and light coming together — life. This light heightened the death god’s senses and his pain. Gray Man felt two Blues, maybe three, maybe four, barely a mile away. He had come to kill them, but somehow the perception of their strong blue light brought even more pain. Life was trying to grow in him even though Horace had finally dissipated and gone.

If he closed his eyes, he could see it like a brilliant red-and-blue tumor growing inside. He conjured up an army of maggots to eat away the fibrous heart. They set at it, gnawing and squirming, but then flew outward, having become crystal-winged butterflies. Gray Man sent sharp flying blades to lacerate the flesh and sinew. But the rich blood flowed out as flowers that fell to the ground and grew.

Gray Man opened his eyes and bit his towel. He took a step toward the door but fell to the floor, moaning.

Winch Fargo walked, on faltering feet, the length of the 700 block of Proctor. His body caught between the music of love and death. The closer Winch got to one, the other one seemed to wane. He’d get to the end of the block and then, feeling the fading of light at his back like the cool breeze from a dark closet, turn to follow that.

Back and forth Winch Fargo staggered, between love and death. His skin was rough and burned from the desert sun and wind. His found pants were too short, revealing thin ankles — one of which was bruised and bloody from its manacle. The overcoat he wore was too warm, with sleeves that went down well below his fingertips.

His senses were assailed by the murmurs of dreams that the people walking by had had in the past few days. Snatches of serene beaches on crisp, cold mornings, of rude rituals, and of sex — not the act of sex, but the feeling of it in their chests and arms and genitals. He eavesdropped not only on human dreams but also on the feral dreaming of cats and rats and dogs. His mind fluttered with the insanity of fleeing birds and the complex geometric flight patterns of flies. Winch Fargo’s perception surpassed animal life and went into the deep serenity of the granite beneath his feet and the confusion of bricks, seeking only dissolution.

Winch Fargo, riding the space between the delicate vibrations of blue light, for a moment in time became a conduit for the soul. The soul: what Ordé had called that energy which binds the tiniest pieces of the universe, that force which seeks to unite and dissimulate. For those few hours Winch Fargo was the black hole of all feelings, beyond life and weight and space.

All he wanted was her, his queen. But so much bombarded him that he couldn’t recognize her signal or even remember what she looked like. He was a wild animal pacing in his cage, looking for a way out and ravenous to the point of rage.

Nesta and Trini had taken a room in a boardinghouse for women. They spent their days at the state building where the state detainment facility was housed. They asked about Claudia Heart/Zimmerman but were told that information about prisoners was private and confidential.

Nesta considered applying for a job in the building; she almost did it. She needed a job while waiting for the chance to see her blue sister. This curiosity about Claudia Heart was the most powerful urge she’d ever felt.

One day she left Trini in the room and went down to the state building to fill out a job application. She was walking up the broad granite stairway when she felt something.

Max the dog ran out from behind the shadows of a stone column, snarling and wagging his tail. Everything about him sang in her mind. The wave of vibrations going through her abdomen and breasts almost made her cry out. She bent down intending to pet Max but ended up sitting on a stair. The dog crawled up, laying his belly across her lap and whimpering. Nesta cried too.

“He was the first,” Nesta said about that meeting. “Like you’d been waiting on a deserted island for years, for your whole life, but you never knew it because you never knew that there was anywhere else. But then he crawled up on me and I held him. I felt his loss. He’d followed a scent there that then turned into a memory. He howled as I held him, and I held him for hours. With my eyes closed I was gone from here. I was out in space with millions just like me, singing the same song that Max did.”

“Were you still human?” I asked. “I mean, when you closed your eyes?”

“This body is like a uniform, Chance. I’m like a soldier. I’m proud of the colors and buttons, but they are only vestiges of the spirit that wears them.” Her amber eyes glowed in the cathedral we called home. I felt a strong anger because of the love she felt for a dog.

So while Miles Barber played the puppet master inside, the real story was elsewhere, in Claudia Heart’s womb and the streets of Sacramento.

Gray Man rose to his feet, shivering like a cold dog. He looked at himself in the mirror. His ungroomed hair looked wild. All the years that Horace LaFontaine had straightened it had killed most of the crinkling, but it was still coarse. When Gray Man brushed the clumps back his head resembled a dark brown porcupine whose quills were only half at rest.

He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He rubbed his hand against his chest, feeling for the pain of life that the redwood had cursed him with. Then he left the room.

He walked out the flophouse door and into the street. The sun grilled down on his bare head. He wore only one black-and-white tennis shoe, the other foot was bare.

“I am Death,” he chanted under his breath again and again. “I can kill. It makes me strong.” He uttered the words, only barely understanding them. This because the redwood’s life had taken root in the soil of his dead soul.

The moment Gray Man stepped out of his door, Winch Fargo was free. The emanations from the death god got clearer as he came closer to Fargo, and Winch knew that it was not his woman’s song. He walked out from the dream of everything, giving it up gladly for the mother of his grandchildren.

He stalked forward, dreaming now only of her feet where he could curl up and worship. Winch didn’t know that her music had dried up. He was following the scent and sound of the dog now. A dog who had also licked and whimpered at the feet of Heart.

Gray Man was walking fast. Two blocks away Winch Fargo broke into a hobbling run. They felt each other, hated each other. Gray Man despised the passion that drove Fargo, while Fargo knew that Death’s light wanted to burn his soul away.

Nineteen

Nesta felt their approach and dreaded it. Max jumped from her lap and began to pace in front of her, stopping now and again to sniff and growl.

Suddenly he grew still and stared down the concrete stairs.

Gray Man was there half barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. He was looking at Nesta with a friendly smile, the smile of a hunter at the end of a long chase.

Max scooted behind his new protector as Winch Fargo turned the corner.

In his bulky coat and short pants Fargo looked like a cartoon sorcerer, down on his luck but still with a trick up his sleeve.

Gray Man, the pain of Redwood pulsing in his temples, turned again. He regarded this new creature with confusion and disdain.

“I’m not concerned with you, half-thing. Go away and suffer what little light you have.”

“Fuck you, man,” Fargo replied. “Fuck you two times. Mess wit’ me an’ I go to war on your butt.”

Nesta wanted to run but was transfixed with the rage and pain down below her. She had never imagined that the light in her eyes could be so twisted and ugly.

“I’ll kill you with just these hands,” Gray Man said on a slender breath. Then he ran at Fargo.

“Hey, you two, stop that,” said a man selling newspapers from a wooden crate on the street.

A woman wearing white pants and a fuzzy pink sweater let out a little scream.

No one but Nesta and Max knew the threat of those skinny arms and legs.

Gray Man, sitting astride his foe’s chest, tried to get his hands around Fargo’s throat, but the ex-con held those hands away while cursing and foaming at the mouth.

As people began to gather, the men, Evil and Death, struggled against each other. They looked like street denizens, prematurely aged and demented by wine. No one moved in to stop them, more from an unwillingness to touch them than from fear of being hurt.

“Die!” Gray Man screeched.

“Fuck you, nigger!” Winch Fargo spat back.

Max the dog paced behind Nesta and then sat back on his haunches, letting out a great howl.

Two policemen came running down the stairs toward the scuffle.

“Stop!” Nesta cried.

“All right, that’s enough of that now,” one of the officers said.

He was a large man with close-cut brown and gray hair that stood straight out from his head. He grabbed Gray Man by the shoulder. Gray Man shot out with his left hand, taking the policeman by his lapel, and yanked down hard, slamming the unsuspecting man into the concrete curb.

With one hand free Winch Fargo threw Gray Man off him and rose. He was panting, almost exhausted from the incredibly strong hands of Death. Winch Fargo planted one foot behind him and looked around for a weapon while he waited for the second attack.

Gray Man was on the ground, but he didn’t look tired. He rose smiling at his adversary. But before he could attack again he was struck from behind by a police stick. It was a hard blow that might have laid out a professional boxer. But Gray Man was only stung. He turned on the second policeman, and the woman in the pink sweater yelled louder.

A crowd had gathered now.

Gray Man broke the second policeman’s neck, but when he went for Winch Fargo again, he found the now barechested savant armed with a police stick.

Fargo used his weapon well. He struck again and again, going backward as he did. Men and women were shouting all around them, but no one tried to interfere.

One man, standing up from the corpse of the first cop, yelled, “Someone get the police!”

Fargo kept striking with deadly accuracy, turning Gray Man’s head around to his shoulder with each blow. And Gray Man advanced, seemingly stronger for every blow that was struck.

Fargo backed up the stairs to get better leverage with his swings. Finally Gray Man bent low and caught Fargo by his legs.

And again Gray Man was trying to get his hands around Winch Fargo’s throat.

Fargo felt the closeness of blue death for the first time since he’d witnessed Philip Martel’s demise. Only now, the death approaching was his own. The snake in his brain writhed and thrashed against the inside of his skull. His hands were failing. Gray Man was beginning to breathe hard too.

Unexpectedly Winch pulled Gray Man toward him, butting the black death god with his own tortured skull. Gray Man sat up. He released Fargo and smiled. Before Winch could react, Gray Man grabbed his left arm and stood up. Placing his foot in Winch’s armpit, he wrenched and tugged.

The arm came out of the socket and ripped away from the shoulder with a sick tearing and sucking sound. Winch cried out and Gray Man laughed. People in the crowd began to run and scream.

A blur of brown fur went for Gray Man’s throat, knocking the little man down the stairs.

Nesta pulled off her denim jeans and wrapped them around Fargo’s narrow shoulders to staunch the bleeding. His blood came fast, but not as fast as a normal man’s blood. Then Nesta Vine grabbed the dismembered arm.

Gray Man had gotten the dog by his front legs, but before he could do any damage he was assailed by the meat-and-bone club.

Nesta’s image of herself was powerful and strong. She wailed at the weakened personification of death. She clubbed him while Max snarled and snapped.

Gray Man finally ran away, feeling Redwood attack him from the inside even as Nesta and Max struck from without.

The frightened mob parted before Gray Man. Max pursued him to the end of the block, then came back to Nesta, who was holding Winch Fargo in her lap.

“Am I dead?” he asked her, coming to consciousness for a moment.

“I don’t know yet,” Nesta Vine replied.

A dozen policemen were pressed into action for the disturbance that had broken out on the state building steps.

They found two dead cops, a seemingly mortally wounded Winch Fargo, a feral dog, and a blood-spattered black amazon.

It took six hours for two dozen police detectives to question the witnesses.

Miles Barber, Briggs, and Bonhomme arrived after the violence was over. When he was told of the battle with Gray Man, Barber suffered a seizure that left him unconscious and hospitalized. His coma was short compared with mine, only fifteen days. And it wasn’t really even a coma, because he remembered a dream. He was still a policeman, with two eyes. He walked out of the state building onto the scene of the murders. There he came upon a pool of blood left by Winch Fargo’s wound.

“But there was something odd,” the ex-detective said, remembering the dream. “The blood wasn’t drying. It was still wet and had blue veins all through it. I went over to inspect the blood, but it flowed away from me, down the stairs. At first I had this crazy thought that it’s ’cause of gravity that the blood is flowing downward. Can you imagine that? Havin’ a scientific reason in your dream.

“So I followed the blood down to the curb, but it keeps on going down the street. The faster I chase it, the faster it goes until I’m running after this blue-veined pool of blood that’s rushing down the street.” As it always was with Barber, he began to experience what he was telling. His breath came quickly and there was visible strain in his body and hands. “I was runnin’ so fast that I couldn’t see where I was going. I ran right into him. He stayed on his feet, but I tumbled to the ground. And when I looked up I saw that it was him; all black and big, real big. He was naked and his eyes were red. And then he bent down over me and he was whispering. Everything around me turned black like him, and all I wanted was to hear the words. I concentrated as hard as I could and then, just when the last of the light was gone, except for his red eyes, I heard him say, ‘It’s never over,’ and everything went black. And then I was coming out to see the blood again. It all happened all over again. Everything was the same except that I knew it.

“When I regained consciousness, they called Bonhomme. He told me that the court had appointed a lawyer for Claudia Zimmerman and she convinced the judge that her client’s rights had been violated. The judge let her go. Mackie Allitar was just down the hall from me, dying from drug abuse, they said. I asked Bonhomme about the black man, the killer.

“ ‘Oh, him,’ Bonhomme said. ‘They think he’s a judo expert. Add that to the fact that Fargo obviously has some kind of leprosy, and it looks pretty crazy out there. We don’t have anything to do with it anyway. We got Halston and Fargo. They let the warden go. Thanks for your help.’

“And I lay back, ready to die, Chance. I swear. I was ready. I lay in that bed for two days. Doctors and nurses came in and frowned at my charts. They stuck me with needles and put soft food on my tray, but they knew I was on my way out. But then the music came. It was like all the horns in the world all at once in a thousand tones, but they were all playing the same note. I was up and outta that bed as strong as I had ever been, stronger. That was about two in the morning. I met Allitar in the hall. We looked at each other and grinned like boys who just climbed over the school fence to check out the big world outside.”

The feral dog escaped from the dog pound the night they caught him. He had been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, but when they tried to carry him from the cell to the gas chamber, he sprang to life suddenly and made a dash for it. No one could ever remember a dog with the will and intelligence to break through a glass windowpane and dash away.

They said he was badly cut, though, and was probably dead within minutes.

Claudia Zimmerman left the Bay Area. No one knew where she went.

Winch Fargo had escaped from police custody a week after Miles Barber and Mackie Allitar, with the assistance of some unknown friend. The hospital doctors, like the dogcatchers, said that Fargo was probably dead a few hours after he escaped.

Gray Man crawled back toward his desert hole, bruised and pulsing with pain. He felt his heart thrumming as if he had been frightened, but he wasn’t actually afraid. He felt the blue coyote pup following him and wondered if he would have been strong enough to fight him off.

He finally arrived and crawled down into his hole, burying himself once again. But this time his sleep was disturbed by unnamed night terrors; this time his sleep was more alive than it was dead.