Part 33 (1/2)
”Roch.e.l.le, is that you?”
The light was not on inside, however. Obviously a tap had simply been left to run. Lamar pushed the door open.
From inside, Buddy spoke: ”No light, please.”
Without the c.o.ke in his system Lamar would have been out of the house before the ghost spoke again, but the drug pumped him up long enough for Buddy to rea.s.sure his partner that there was nothing to be afraid of.
”She said you were here,” Lamar breathed.
”You didn't believe her?”
”No.”
”Who are you?”
”What do you mean: who am I? It's Jimmy. Jimmy Lamar.”
”Of course. Come in. We should have words.”
”No...I'll stay out here.”
”I can't hear you too well.”
”Turn off the water.”
”I need it to p.i.s.s.”
”You p.i.s.s?”
”Only when I drink.”
”You drink?”
”Do you blame me, with her down there and me unable to touch her?”
”Yeah. That's too bad.”
”You'll have to do it for me, Jimmy.”
”Do what?”
”Touch her. You're not gay are you?”
”You know better than that.”
”Of course.”
”The number of women we had together.”
”We were friends.”
”The best. And I must say you're real sweet, letting me have Roch.e.l.le.”
”She's yours. And in return-”
”What?”
”Be my friend again.”
”Buddy. I missed you.”
”I missed you, Jimmy.”
”You were right,” he said when he got downstairs. ”Buddy is here.”
”You saw him.”
”No, but he spoke to me. He wants us to be friends. Him and me. And you and me. Close friends.”
”Then we will be.”
”For Buddy.”
”For Buddy.”
Upstairs, the Jaff turned this new and unexpected element in the game over, and judged it good. He had intended to pa.s.s himself off as Buddy-a trick all too easy, given that he'd drunk down the man's thoughts-to Roch.e.l.le only. In that form he'd come visiting two nights before, and found her drunk in her bed. It had been easy to coax her into believing he was her husband's spirit; the only difficult part had been preventing himself from claiming marital rights. Now, with the partner under the same delusion, he had two agents in the house to a.s.sist him when the guests arrived.
After the events of the previous night he was glad he'd had the foresight to organize the party. Fletcher's machinations had caught him off-guard. In that act of self-destruction his enemy had contrived to put a sliver of his hallucigenia-producing soul into a hundred, maybe two hundred minds. Even now the recipients were dreaming up their personal divinities; and making them solid. They would not, on past evidence, be particularly barbaric; certainly not the equals of his terata. Nor, without their instigator alive to fuel them, would they linger long on this plane of being. But they could still do his well-laid plans much mischief. He might well need the creatures he could summon from the hearts of Hollywood to prevent Fletcher's last testament from interfering.
Soon, the journey that had begun the first time he'd heard of the Art-so long ago he couldn't even remember from whom-would end with his entering Quiddity. After so many years of preparation it would be like coming home. He'd be a thief in Heaven, and therefore King of Heaven, given that he'd be the only presence there qualified to steal the throne. He would own the dreamlife of the world; be all things to all men, and never be judged.
There were two days left, then. The first, the twenty-four hours it would take him to realize that ambition.
The second, the day of the Art, when he would reach the place where dawn and dusk, noon and night, occurred at the same perpetual moment.
Thereafter, there was only forever.
V.
For Tesla, leaving Palomo Grove was like waking from sleep in which some dream-tutor had instructed her that all life was dreaming. There would be no simple division from now on between sense and nonsense; no arrogant a.s.sumption that this experience was real and this one not. Maybe she was living in a movie, she thought as she drove. Come to think of it that wasn't a bad idea for a screenplay: the story of a woman who discovered that human history was just one vast family saga, written by that underrated team Gene and Chance, and watched by angels, aliens and folks in Pittsburgh who had tuned in by accident and were hooked. Maybe she'd write that story, once this adventure was over.
Except that it would never be over; not now. That was one of the consequences of seeing the world this way. For better or worse she would spend the rest of her life antic.i.p.ating the next miracle; and while she waited, inventing it in her fiction, so as to p.r.i.c.k herself and her audience into vigilance.
The drive was easy, at least as far as Tijuana, and left room for such musings. Once she had crossed the border, however, she had to consult the map she'd bought, and was obliged to postpone any further plottings or prophecies. She had committed Fletcher's instructions to memory like an acceptance speech, and they-with help from the map-proved good. Never having travelled the peninsula before she was surprised to find it so deserted. This was not an environment in which man and his works had much hope of sustained existence, which led to the expectation that the Mission ruins, when she reached them, would most likely have been eroded, or swept away into the Pacific, whose murmur grew in volume as her route took her closer to the coast.
She could not have been more wrong in that expectation. As she rounded the bend of the hill Fletcher had directed her to, it was immediately apparent that the Mision de Santa Catrina was very much intact. The sight made her innards churn. A few minutes' drive, and she'd be standing before the site at which an epic story-of which she knew only the tiniest part-had begun. For a Christian, perhaps Bethlehem would have aroused the same excitement. Or Golgotha.
It was not a place of skulls, she found. Quite the reverse. Though the fabric of the Mission had not been rebuilt-its blasted rubble was still spread over a substantial area-somebody had clearly preserved it from further dissolution. The reason for that preservation only became apparent once she'd parked the car, some way off from the building, and approached on foot across the dusty ground. The Mission, built for holy purpose, deserted, then turned to an endeavor its architects would surely have deemed heretical, was once again sanctified.