The Great And Secret Show Part 63

"No," she told him. "We're going to be all right." She put her arm through his, the pains in her side stabbing her with every movement she made. "Get up, Grillo. I'm cold and it's going to get dark soon." Pitch black, in fact; the luminescence from the decaying terata was dimming fast. "There's sun up there, Grillo. It's warm. It's light."

Her words made him open his eyes.

"Witt's dead," he said.

The waves from the cataract had pushed the corpse to the sh.o.r.e.

"We're not going to join him," Tesla said. "We're going to live, Grillo. So get the f.u.c.k up."

"We...can't...swim up..."he said, looking at the cataract.

"There's other ways out," Tesla said. "Easier ways. But we have to be quick."

She looked across the chamber to where Jaffe was surveying the cracks in the walls, looking, she presumed, for the best exit. He was in no better shape than the rest of them, and a strenuous climb was going to be out of the question. She saw him call Hotchkiss over, and put him to work digging out rubble. He then moved on to survey other holes. It crossed Tesla's mind that the man didn't have any more clue how to get out of here than they did, but she distracted herself from that anxiety by returning to the business of getting Grillo to his feet. It took some more coaxing, but she succeeded. He stood up, his legs almost buckling beneath him until he rubbed some life back into them.

"Good," she said. "Good. Now let's go."

She allowed herself one last glance at Witt's body, hoping that wherever he was, it was a good place. If everybody got their own Heaven she knew where Witt would be now. In a celestial Palomo Grove: a small, safe town in a small, safe valley, where the sun always shone and the realty business was good. She silently wished him well, and turned her back on his remains, wondering as she did so if perhaps he'd known all along that he was going to die today, and was happier to be part of the foundation of the Grove than wasted in smoke from a crematorium.

Hotchkiss had been called away from his rubble-cleaning at one crack to the same duties on another, fuelling Tesla's unwelcome suspicion that Jaffe didn't know his way out of here. She went to Hotchkiss's aid, bullying Grillo out of his lethargy to do the same. The air from the hole smelled stale. There was no breath of anything fresh from above. But then perhaps they were too deep for that.

The work was hard, and harder still in the gathering darkness. Never in her life had she felt so close to complete collapse. There was no sensation in her hands whatsoever: her face was numb; her body sluggish. She was sure most corpses were warmer. But an age ago, somewhere in the sun, she'd told Hotchkiss she was as able as any man, and she was determined to make that claim good. She drove herself hard, pulling at the rocks with the same gusto as he did. But it was Grillo who did the bulk of the work, his eagerness undoubtedly fuelled by desperation. He cleared the largest of the rocks with a strength she'd not have thought him capable of.

"So," she said to Jaffe. "Do we go?"

"Yes."

"This is the way out?"

"It's as good as any," he said, and took the lead.

There began a trek that was in its way more terrifying than the descent. For one, they had only a single torch between them, which Hotchkiss, who followed after Jaffe, carried. It was pitifully inadequate, its light more like a beam for Tesla and Grillo to follow than a means to illuminate the path. They stumbled, and fell, and stumbled again, the numbness welcome in a way, postponing as it did any knowledge of what harm they were doing themselves.

The first part of the route didn't even take them up, it merely wound through several small compartments, the sound of water roaring in the rock around them. They pa.s.sed along one tunnel that had clearly been a recent water-course. The mud was thigh-deep; and dripped from the ceiling on to their heads, for which, a little while on, they were duly grateful, when the pa.s.sage narrowed to the point where had they not been slick with the stuff they'd have been hard pressed to squeeze through. Beyond this point they began to climb, the gradient gentle at first, then steepening. Now, though the sound of water diminished, there was a new threat in the walls: the grinding of earth on earth. n.o.body said anything. They were too exhausted to waste breath on the obvious, that the ground that the Grove was built upon was in revolt. The sounds got louder the higher they climbed, and several times dust fell from the tunnel roof, spattering them in the darkness.

It was Hotchkiss who felt the breeze first.

"Fresh air," he said.

"Of course," said Jaffe.

Tesla looked back towards Grillo. Her senses were so whacked out she wasn't sure of them any longer.

"You feel it?" she said to him.

"I think so," he said, his voice barely audible.

The promise speeded their advance, though it was tougher going all the time, the tunnels actually shaking at several points, such was the violence of the motion in the ground around them. But there was more than a hint of clean air to coax them on now; there was the faintest suspicion of light somewhere above them, which became more of a certainty by and by, until they could actually see the rock they were climbing up, Jaffe hauling himself one-handed, with a strange, almost floating ease, as though his body weighed next to nothing. The others scrambled after, barely able to keep up with him despite the adrenaline that had begun to pump through their weary systems. The light was strengthening, and it was that which led them on, its glare making them squint. It continued to get brighter, and brighter still. They climbed to it with fervor now, all caution in their hand and footholds forgotten.

Tesla's thoughts were a ragged bundle of non sequiturs, more like daydreams than conscious thought. Her mind was too exhausted to organize itself. But time and again it visited the five minutes she'd had to solve the problem of the medallion. Quite why she only grasped as the sky finally came in sight: that this ascent from the darkness was like a climb out of the past; out of death, too. From the coldblooded thing to the warmblooded. From the blind and immediate to the far-sighted. Vaguely she thought: this is why men go underground. To remember why they live in the sun.

At the very last, with the brightness from above overwhelming, Jaffe stood back and let Hotchkiss overtake him.

"Changing your mind?" Tesla said.

There was more than doubt on his face, however.

"What's to be afraid of?" she asked him.

"The sun," he said.

"Are you two moving?" Grillo said.

"In a moment," Tesla told him. "You go on."

He pressed past them both, scrabbling up the remaining feet to the surface. Hotchkiss was already there. She heard him laughing to himself. Postponing the pleasure of joining him was hard but they hadn't come this far to leave their prize behind.

"I hate the sun," Jaffe said.

"Why?"

"It hates me."

"You mean it hurts? Are you some kind of vampire?"

Jaffe squinted up at the light.

"It was Fletcher who loved the sky."

"Well maybe you should learn something from him."

"It's too late."

"No it isn't. You've done some s.h.i.t stuff in your time, but you've got a chance to make good. There's worse coming than you. Think about that."

He didn't respond.

"Look," she went on, "the sun doesn't care what you did. It shines on everyone, good and bad. I wish it didn't but it does."

He nodded.

"Did I ever tell you..." he said, "...about Omaha?"

"Don't try and put it off, Jaffe. We're going up."

"I'll die," he said.

"Then all your troubles will be over, won't they?" she said. "Come an!"

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.