Part 57 (1/2)
”I thought I'd never see you again,” she said, her hands over her face.
”I wouldn't have left you.”
”At least we can die together now.”
”Where's Tommy-Ray?”
”He's gone,” she said.
”We've got to do the same,” Howie said. ”Get off the island as quickly as possible. Something terrible's coming.”
She dared to look up at him, her eyes as clear and blue as they'd ever been, staring out at him like the gleam of treasure in muck. The sight made him hold her tighter, as if to prove to her (and to himself) that he'd mastered the horror. He hadn't. It was her beauty that had first taken his breath away. Now that was gone. He had to look beyond its absence to the Jo-Beth he'd later come to love. That was going to be hard.
He looked away from her, towards the sea. The waves were thunderous.
”We have to go back into Quiddity,” he said.
”We can't!” she said. ”I can't!”
”We've got no choice. It's the only way back.”
”It did this to me,” she said. ”It changed me!”
”If we don't go now,” Howie said, ”we never go. It's as simple as that. We stay here and we die here.”
”Maybe that's for the best,” she said.
”How can that be?” Howie said. ”How's dying for the best?”
”The sea'll kill us anyway. It'll twist us up.”
”Not if we trust it. Give ourselves over to it.”
He remembered, briefly, his journey here, floating on his back, watching the lights. If he thought the return trip would be so mellow he was kidding himself. Quiddity was no longer a tranquil sea of souls. But what other choice did they have?
”We can stay,” Jo-Beth said again. ”We can die here, together. Even if we got back-” she started to sob again, ”-even if we got back I couldn't live like this.”
”Stop crying,” he told her. ”And stop talking about dying. We're going to get back to the Grove. Both of us. If not for our sakes, then to warn people.”
”About what?”
”There's something coming across Quiddity. An invasion. Heading home. That's why the sea's going wild.”
The commotion in the sky above them was every bit as violent. There was no sign, either in sea or sky, of the spirit-lights. However precious these moments on the Ephemeris were, every last dreamer had forsaken the journey, and woken. He envied them the ease of that pa.s.sage. Just to be able to snap out of this honor and find yourself back in your own bed. Sweaty, maybe; scared, certainly. But home. Sweet and easy. Not so for the trespa.s.sers like themselves, flesh and blood in a place of spirit. Nor, now he thought of it, for the others here. He owed them a warning, though he suspected his words would be ignored.
”Come with me,” he said.
He took hold of Jo-Beth's hand and they headed back along the beach to where the rest of the survivors were gathered. Very little had changed, though the man who'd been lying in the waves had now gone, dragged away, Howie presumed, by the violence of the sea. Apparently n.o.body had gone to his aid. They were standing or sitting as before, their lazy gazes still on Quiddity. Howie went to the nearest of them, a man not much older than himself, with a face born for its present vacuity.
”You have to get out of here,” he said. ”We all have to.”
The urgency in his voice did something to rouse the man from his torpor, but not much. He managed a wary ”Yeah?” but did nothing.
”You'll die if you stay,” Howie told him, then raised his voice above the waves to address them all. ”You'll die!” he said. ”You have to go into Quiddity, and let it take you back.”
”Where?” said the young man.
”What do you mean, where?”
”Back where?”
”To the Grove. The place you came from. Don't you remember?”
There was no answer forthcoming from any of them. Maybe the only way to get an exodus going was to start it, Howie reasoned.
”It's now or never,” he said to Jo-Beth.
There was still resistance, both in her expression and in her body. He had to take firm hold of her hand and lead her down towards the waves.
”Trust me,” he said.
She didn't answer him, but nor did she fight to stay on the beach. A distressing docility had come over her, its only virtue, he thought, that maybe Quiddity would leave her alone this time. He was not so sure it would treat him with such indifference. He was by no means as detached from high emotion as he'd been on the outward journey. There were all kinds of feelings running rife in him, any or all of which Quiddity might want to make play with. Fear for their lives ranked highest, of course. Close after, the confusion of repugnance at Jo-Beth's condition and his guilt at that repugnance. But the message in the air was urgent enough to keep him moving down the beach in spite of such anxieties. It was almost a physical sensation now, which reminded him of some other time in his life, and of course of some other place; a memory he couldn't quite grasp. It didn't matter. The message was unambiguous. Whatever the Iad were, they brought pain: relentless, unendurable. A holocaust in which every property of death would be explored and celebrated but the virtue of cessation, which would be postponed until the Cosm was a single human sob for release. Somewhere he'd known a hint of this before, in a little corner of Chicago. Perhaps his mind was doing him service, refusing to remember where.
The waves were a yard ahead, rising in slow arcs and booming as they broke.
”This is it,” he said to Jo-Beth.
Her only response-one he was mightily grateful for- was to tighten her hold on his hand, and together they stepped back into the transforming sea.
IV.
The door of the Nguyen house was answered to Grillo, not by Ellen, but by her son. ”Is your mom in?” he asked.
The boy still looked far from well, though he was no longer dressed for bed, but in grubby jeans and a grubbier T-s.h.i.+rt.
”I thought you'd gone away,” he said to Grillo.
”Why?”
”Everybody else has.”
”That's right.”
”You want to come in?”
”I'd like to see your mom.”
”She's busy,” Philip said, but opened the door anyway. The house was even more of a shambles than it had been before, the remains of several ad hoc meals spread around. The creations of a child gourmet, Grillo guessed: hot dogs and ice cream.