Part 63 (2/2)
He stared hard at her, the gleam she'd seen in his eyes when they'd been in the cave entirely gone. Indeed there was nothing about him that signalled any supernatural capacity. He was completely unremarkable: a gray, wretched husk of a man, whom she wouldn't have given a second glance to on the street, except perhaps to wonder what trauma had brought him so low. They'd spent a lot of time, effort (and Witt's life) getting him out of the earth. He didn't look like much of a reward for that. Head bowed against the glare, he climbed on up the last few feet and into the sun. She followed, the brightness becoming dizzying, almost nauseating. She closed her eyes against it, until the sound of laughter made her open them.
It was more than relief that had Hotchkiss and Grillo chuckling to themselves. The route home had brought them out in the middle of the parking lot of the Terrace Motel.
”Welcome to Palomo Grove,” the sign read. ”The Prosperous Haven.”
VI.
As Carolyn Hotchkiss had liked to remind her three best friends all those years ago, the earth's crust was thin, and the Grove had been built along a flaw in that crust, which would one day crack and drop the town into an abyss. In the two decades since she'd silenced her own prophecies with pills, the technology for predicting that moment had advanced by leaps and bounds. Hairline cracks could be mapped, their activity closely monitored. In the event of the big one the warnings would hopefully come fast enough to save the lives of millions, not only in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but in smaller communities like the Grove. None of these monitors and mapmakers, however, could have predicted the suddenness of events up at Coney Eye, or the scale of their consequences. The skewing of the interior of the Vance house had sent a subtle but persuasive message into the Hill, and out through the caves and tunnels below the town, urging a system that had been murmuring for years to roll over and shout. Though the most spectacular consequences of that mutiny occurred on the lower reaches of the Hill, where the ground opened up as though the big one was indeed underway, tipping one of the Crescents into a fissure two hundred yards long and twenty wide, every village sustained damage. The destruction didn't die down after the first shock-wave, as might have been expected with a conventional quake. It escalated, the message of anarchy spreading, minor subsidence becoming significant enough to devour houses, garages, sidewalks and stores. In Deerdell, the streets closest to the woods were the first to suffer damage, the few residents remaining warned of the coming destruction by a ma.s.s exodus of animals, who made their escape before the trees began to try to uproot themselves and follow. Failing, they fell. The houses followed soon after, street on street toppling like dominoes. Stillbrook and Laureltree sustained equally comprehensive damage, but without due warning or any discernible pattern. Creva.s.ses opened suddenly in the middle of streets and back yards. Pools drained of water in a matter of seconds; driveways turned into models of the Grand Canyon. But whether arbitrary or systematic, sudden or signalled, in the end it came down to the same thing from village to village. The Grove was being swallowed up by the ground it had been built upon.
There were deaths, of course; many. But for the most part they went unnoticed, being those of people who'd stayed locked up alone in their houses for several days, nursing suspicions about the world they dared not take out into the light. n.o.body missed them because n.o.body knew who'd left town and who'd stayed. The Gravers' show of solidarity, after that first night at the Mall, had been strictly cosmetic. There'd been no emergency community meetings called; no sharing of mutually held fears. As things got steadily worse families had simply sloped away, often by night, still more often without saying anything to the neighbors. The loners who'd remained were buried under the rubble of the roofs without anybody even knowing they'd been there in the first place. By the time the authorities became aware of how widespread the damage was, many of the streets were no-go areas, and finding the victims was a task for another day, when the more urgent issue of what had happened (and was still happening) in the Buddy Vance residence was not so pressing.
It had been apparent to the first investigators-seasoned patrolmen who'd thought they'd seen everything-that some power had been released in Coney Eye that wasn't going to be easily defined. An hour and a half after the first car reached Coney Eye, and the patrolman reported to his superiors the condition of the house, several FBI men were on the scene, and two professors-a physicist and a geologist-were on their way from L.A. The house was entered, and the phenomenon in its interior, which defied all easy explanation, judged to be potentially lethal. What was perfectly clear, among countless uncertainties, was the fact that the Grovers had somehow been aware of some fundamental disruption occurring (or about to occur) in their midst. They'd started to desert their town hours or perhaps days before. Why none of them had chosen to alert anyone beyond the perimeters of the Grove to the danger there was just one of countless mysteries the site presented.
Had the investigators known where to look they'd have had their answers from any one of the individuals who'd dragged themselves up out of the ground in front of the Terrace Motel. They'd probably have dismissed those answers as lunacy, but even Tesla-who'd been pa.s.sionately determined that Grillo not tell his story-would have told it freely now, had she had the strength. The warmth of the sun, indeed the sight of it, had revived her somewhat, but it had also dried the mud and blood on her face and body, and sealed in the deep chill in her marrow. Jaffe had been the first to seek the shadows of the motel. After only a few minutes, she followed. The motel had been deserted by guests and staff alike, and with good reason. The fissure in the lot was one of many, the largest of which spread through the front door of the building, its cracks climbing its facade like earth-born lightning. Inside there were ample signs of how hurried a departure the last occupants had made, luggage and personal items scattered up and down the stairs, the doors that hadn't been unseated by the tremors thrown wide. She wandered along the row of rooms till she found some abandoned clothes, ran herself a shower, the water as hot as she could stand, stripped and stepped in. The warmth made her dreamy, and it was all she could do to drag herself out of its bliss and dry herself. There were mirrors, unfortunately. Her bruised, aching body was a pitiful sight. She covered it as quickly as possible, with items that neither fitted nor matched, which pleased her-Hobo had always been her preferred aesthetic. While dressing she availed herself of cold coffee, left in the room. It was three-twenty when she emerged: almost seven hours since the four of them had driven to Deerdell to make the descent.
Grillo and Hotchkiss were in the office. They'd brewed hot coffee. They'd also washed, though not as thoroughly as she, instead scrubbing masks of clean skin out of the surrounding muck. They'd also stripped off their sodden sweaters and found jackets to wear. Both were smoking.
”We got it all,” Grillo said, his manner that of a man profoundly embarra.s.sed, and determined to brave it out. ”Coffee. Cigarettes. Stale doughnuts. All we're missing's serious drugs.”
”Where's Jaffe?” Tesla wanted to know.
”Don't know,” Grillo said.
”What do you mean, you don't know?” Tesla said. ”For Christ's sake, Grillo, we shouldn't let him out of our sight.”
”He came this far, didn't he?” Grillo replied. ”He's not going to walk away now.”
”Maybe,” Tesla conceded. She poured herself coffee. ”Is there any sugar?”
”No, but there's pastries and cheesecake. Stale but edible. Somebody had a sweet tooth. You want?”
”I want,” Tesla said. She sipped the coffee. ”I suppose you're right-”
”About the sweet tooth?”
”About Jaffe.”
”He doesn't give a f.u.c.k for us,” Hotchkiss said. ”Makes me sick to look at him.”
”Well, you've got reason,” Grillo said.
”d.a.m.n right,” said Hotchkiss. He gave Tesla a sideways glance. ”When this is done with,” he said, ”I want him to myself. OK? We've got scores to settle.”
He didn't wait for a reply. Taking his coffee he headed back out into the sun.
”What was that about?” Tesla said.
”Carolyn,” Grillo said.
”Of course.”
”He blames Jaffe for what happened to her. And he's right.”
”He must be going through h.e.l.l.”
”I don't think the trip's anything new to him,” Grillo said.
”I suppose not.” She emptied her mug of coffee. ”That's wired me for a while,” she said. ”I'm going to find Jaffe.”
”Before you do-”
”Yeah?”
”I just want to say...what happened to me down there...I'm sorry I wasn't more use. I've always had this thing about being buried alive.”
”Sounds reasonable to me,” Tesla said.
”I want to make it up to you. Want to help any way I can. Just say the word. I know you've got a take on all of this. I haven't.”
”Not really.”
”You persuaded Jaffe to come with us. How'd you do that?”
”He had a puzzle. I solved it.”
”You make it sound real simple.”
”Thing is, I think maybe the whole thing's simple. What we're facing's so big, Grillo, we just have to go on instinct.”
”Yours was always better than mine. I like facts.”
”They're simple too,” she said. ”There's a hole, and something coming through it from the other side which people like you and me don't even have the capacity to imagine. If we don't close the hole, we're f.u.c.ked.”
”And the Jaff knows how?”
”How what?”
”To close the hole.”
Tesla stared at him.
”At a guess?” she said. ”No.”
She found him, of all places, on the roof, which was literally the last place in the motel she'd chosen to look. Surprisingly, he was engaged in the last activity she'd have expected from him. He was staring at the sun.
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