The Great And Secret Show Part 61

She sat up gingerly. "All over," she said. Pain was getting through numbness in a dozen places: head, neck, arms, belly. To judge by the way Hotchkiss moaned as he began to stand up, he had the same problem. Grillo was simply staring at the water that had claimed Witt, his teeth chattering.

"It's behind us," Hotchkiss said.

"What is?"

"The light. It's coming from behind us."

She turned, the aches in her side becoming short stabbing pains. She tried to keep her complaints to herself, but Hotchkiss caught her intake of breath.

"Can you walk?" he said.

"Can you?" she returned.

"Compet.i.tion?" he said.

"Yeah."

She made a small sideways glance at him. There was blood coming from the region of his right ear, and he was nursing his left arm with his right.

"You look like s.h.i.t," she said.

"So do you."

"Grillo? Are you coming?"

There was no reply; only chattering teeth.

"Grillo?" she said.

He had turned his eyes from the water and was looking up at the roof of the cavern.

"It's on top of us," she heard him murmur. "All that earth. On top of us."

"It's not going to fall," Tesla said. "We're going to get out."

"No we're not. We're f.u.c.king buried alive! We're buried alive!"

He was suddenly on his feet, and the chattering had become ringing sobs. "Get me out of here! Get me out of here!"

"Shut up, Grillo," Hotchkiss said, but Tesla knew no words were going to stop the panic running its course. She let him sob, and started towards the crack in the wall through which the light was coming.

It's the Jaff, she thought as she went. It can't be daylight, so it must be the Jaff. She'd planned what she was going to say to him, but the persuasions had been sluiced out of her head. All she could do was wing it. Confront the man and hope her tongue would do the rest.

Behind her, she heard Grillo's sobs stop, and Hotchkiss say: "That's Witt."

She looked around. Witt's body had come to the surface of the pool, and was lying face down in the water, some way from the sh.o.r.e. She didn't stare, but turned back towards the crack and headed on, her pace painfully slow. She had a distinct sense of being drawn to the light, that sense stronger the closer she got, as though her cells, touched by the Nuncio, sensed the proximity of someone similarly touched. It gave her weary body the necessary momentum to cross to the crack. She leaned against the stone, and peered in. The cavern beyond was smaller than the one she was leaving. In the middle was what on first viewing she took to be a fire, but it was only a distant relation. The light it gave off was cold, and its flickering was far from steady. There was no sign of its maker.

She stepped inside, announcing her presence to be certain he didn't misread her approach and attack.

"Anyone here?" she said. "I want to speak with...with Randolph Jaffe."

She chose to call him by that name in the hope of appealing to the man he'd been rather than the Artist he'd aspired to being. It worked. From a fissure in the furthest corner of the chamber a voice as fatigued as her own emerged.

"Who are you?"

"Tesla Bombeck."

She started towards the fire, using it as an excuse to enter. "Don't mind do you?" she said, stripping off her sodden gloves and extending her palms to the joyless flames.

"There's no heat," Jaffe said. "It's not a real fire."

"So I see," she said. The fuel looked to be rotted matter of some kind. Terata. The smoky glow which she'd taken for flame was the last vestiges of their decay.

"Looks like we're on our own," she said.

"No," he said. "I'm on my own. You've brought people."

"Yes. I have. You know one of them. Nathan Grillo?"

The name brought Jaffe out of hiding.

Twice she'd seen insanity in his eyes. Once at the Mall, pointed out by Howie. The second time when he'd stumbled out of the Vance house, leaving the schism he'd opened roaring behind him. Now she saw it a third time, but intensified.

"Grillo is here?" he said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you here?"

"To find you," she explained. "We need...we need your help."

The lunatic eyes swivelled in Tesla's direction. There was, she thought, some vague other form hovering around him, like a shadow thrown through smoke. A head swollen to grotesque proportions. She tried not to think too hard about what it was, or what its appearance signified. There was only one issue here: getting this madman to unburden himself of his secrets. Best perhaps that she volunteered one of her own first.

"We've got something in common," she said. "Quite a few things in fact, but one in particular."

"The Nuncio," he said. "Fletcher sent you for it, and you couldn't resist it."

"That's true," she said, preferring to agree with him rather than argue and lose his attention. "But that's not the important thing."

"What is?"

"Kissoon," she said.

His eyes flickered.

"He sent you," he said.

s.h.i.t, she thought, that's blown it.

"No," she said quickly. "Absolutely not."

"What does he want from me?"

"Nothing. I'm not his go-between. He got me into the Loop for the same reason he got you in, all those years ago. You remember that?"

"Oh yes," he said, his voice totally devoid of color. "Difficult to forget."

"But do you know why he wanted you in the Loop?"

"He needed an acolyte."

"No. He needed a body. "

"Oh yes. He wanted that too."

"He's a prisoner there, Jaffe. The only way he could ever get out was by stealing a body."

"Why are you telling me this?" he said. "Haven't we got better things to do, before the end?"

"The end?"

"Of the world," he said. He put his back against the wall and allowed gravity to take him down on to his haunches. "That's what's going to happen, isn't it?"

"What makes you think that?"

Jaffe raised his hands in front of his face. They hadn't healed at all. The flesh had been bitten off down to the bone in several places. Two fingers and the thumb of his right hand had gone entirely.

"I get glimpses," he said, "of things Tommy-Ray is seeing. There's something coming..."

"Can you see what?" she asked him, eager for any clue, however small, as to the Iad's nature. Did they come bearing baubles or bombs?

"No. Just a terrible night. An everlasting night. I don't want to see it."

"You have to look," Tesla said. "Isn't that what Artists are supposed to do? To look and keep looking, even when the thing you're looking at is too much to bear. You're an Artist, Randolph-"

"No. I'm not."

"You opened the schism didn't you?" she said. "I'm not saying I agree with your methods, I don't, but you did what n.o.body else dared do. Maybe could ever do."

"Kissoon planned it all this way," Jaffe said. "I see that now. He made me his acolyte even though I didn't know it. He used me."

"I don't think so," Tesla said. "I don't think even he could have plotted something so byzantine. How could he know you and Fletcher would discover the Nuncio? No. What happened to you wasn't planned...you were your own agent in this, not Kissoon's. The power's yours. And so's the responsibility."

She let her argument rest there for a little while, as much because she was exhausted as for any other reason. Jaffe didn't follow through. He just stared at the pseudofire, which would soon be guttering out, and then at his hands. It was only after a minute of this that he said: "You came down here to tell me that?"

"Yes. Don't tell me I came on a fool's errand."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Help us."

"There's no help to be had."

"You opened the hole, you can close it."

"I'm not going near that house."

"I thought you wanted Quiddity," Tesla said. "I thought being there was your great ambition."

"I was wrong."

"You got all that way, just to discover you were wrong? What changed your mind?"

"You won't understand."

"Try me."

He looked back towards the fire. "That was the last of them," he said. "When the light goes, we're all in the dark."

"There must be other ways out of here."

"There are."

"Then we'll take one of them. But first...first...tell me why you changed your mind."

He took a lazy moment to contemplate his answer, or whether he was going to give it at all.

Then he said: "When I first began looking for the Art, all the clues were about crossroads. Not all. But many. Yes, many. The ones that made any sense to me. And so I kept looking for a crossroads. I thought that was where I'd find the answer. Then Kissoon drew me into his Loop, and I thought, here he is, the last of the Shoal, in a hut in the middle of nowhere. No crossroads. I must have been wrong. And all that's happened since: at the Mission, in the Grove...none of it happened at a crossroads. I was being literal, you see. I've always been so d.a.m.n literal. Physical. Actual. Fletcher thought of air and sky, and I thought of power and bone. He made dreams from people's heads, I made stuff from their guts and sweat. Always thinking the obvious. And all the time..." his voice was thickening with feeling; hatred in it, self-directed, "...all the time I didn't see. Until I used the Art, and realized what the crossroads were-"

"What?"

He put the less injured of his hands to his shirt, fumbling inside it. There was a medallion around his neck, on a fine chain. He pulled, hard. The chain broke, and he tossed the symbol over to Tesla. She knew before she caught it what it was going to be. She'd played this scene once before, with Kissoon. But that time she'd not been ready to understand what she understood now, holding the Shoal's sign in her hand.

"The crossroads," she said. "This is its symbol."

"I don't know what symbols are any longer," he replied. "It's all one."

"But this stands for something," she said, looking again at the forms inscribed on the arm of the cross.

"To understand it is to have it," Jaffe said. "At the moment of comprehension it's no longer a symbol."

"Then...make me understand," Tesla said. "Because I look at this and it's still just a cross. I mean, it's beautiful an' all, but it doesn't mean a whole lot. There's this guy in the center, looks like he's being crucified, 'cept there's no nails. And then all these creatures."

"Doesn't it make any sense?"