Chapter Twenty One

Trevor felt himself rising through the syrupy air of the room, through the ceiling and the roof, out into the night. The sky arched above him like a great black bowl pricked with diamonds. He saw the kudzu swarming over the roof, the sturdy little car parked behind the house, the willow tree in the yard where he and Zach had talked that first day, fronds wavering in the terrible razor-edged moonlight. He was rising and rising. He could see the streets of Missing Mile in the distance, dark and still. The house was far below him now, a toy rectangle he could almost forget.

This isn't where I'm supposed to be, he realized. Got to get back to Birdland. . .

All at once it was like a film being run in reverse and speeded up; he was falling in a dizzy spiral back toward the roof, through the sucking vines, back through the ceiling and into the rooms and melting down the walls and crackling through the power lines and dripping from the faucets and disappearing down the drains, into the broken fragments of the mirror. . .

He was there.

The thought filled him with a cold excitement that was almost fear. Whatever, wherever Birdland was, he was there now.

The sensations of his body returned. He opened his eyes and found himself standing on a street corner in a city he could not name. It was like a composite of every city he had ever been in, the run-down sections and shady neighborhoods: ashen buildings squirming with illegible graffiti, broken and boarded windows, ragged posters stapled to telephone poles, peeling from brick walls. The few splashes of color in the landscape seemed somehow wrong.

The sidewalk and the street were empty. Though the slice of sky above him was an unhealthy purplish color that reflected back the city's light and masked any moon or stars, it seemed very late at night. Trevor saw no signs of life in the buildings around him, heard no traffic, no voices.

But the place did not feel threatening. He thought he recognized it, and he was sure it recognized him. Trevor chose a direction at random and started walking. He thought he heard the wail of a saxophone in the distance, though it kept fading in and out until he couldn't be sure it was there at all.

He passed the dark maw of a parking garage with a length of chicken wire stretched across it, a stretch of vacant lot seeded with broken bottles, a row of pawnshops, laundromats, storefront churches of Holy Light, all closed. Everything had a stark, slick, compressed look, more than two dimensions but not quite three. The buildings were solid enough; he could feel the sidewalk under his feet, the cool night air blowing his hair back from his face, the bones in his fingers moving as he stuck his hands in his pocketsPockets? He had been lying naked in bed with Zach. Trevor looked down at himself and saw that he was wearing a black pinstriped suit jacket with wide notched lapels, 1940s-style lapels. Underneath it was a black silk shirt with a loud checkered tie knotted loosely at the collar. His trousers matched the jacket, and on his feet were a pair of scuffed but obviously expensive black loafers. He had never worn clothes like this, but he'd seen hundreds of photos of Charlie Parker in just such a getup.

Trevor kept walking. Once he smelled the aroma of coffee, rich and strong, but he couldn't trace its direction. After a few minutes it was gone.

Soon he came to a row of bars that seemed to be open. The block was lit with old-fashioned wrought-iron gas lamps on each corner. The bars were dark, but neon flickered far in their depths, fitful chartreuse, cool blue, lurid crimson. The narrow alleys between the bars were darker still. A yeasty perfume drifted from them: the smell of a hundred kinds of liquor-dregs mingling, brewing a noxious new poison.

A few cars were parked along the curb, humpy sedans, and finned dragsters, all empty. But there was still no one else on the street, and the windows of the bars were opaque, throwing back distorted reflections. The street was full of puddles that rippled with strange light and seductive colors.

All at once Trevor realized what was wrong with the colors here. The place was like a black-and-white photograph tinted by hand, overlaid with color rather than permeated with it. It had an appearance at once faded and garish.

Bobby's comic had always been drawn in black and white. He remembered Didi coloring in a page of it with crayons once, just scribbling in a swath of red here, a streak of blue there. That had looked sort of like this place.

Trevor stood uncertainly on the sidewalk, reluctant to enter any of the dark bars, hesitant to leave the signs of life behind him. The street seemed to grow darker in the distance, the buildings larger and more industrial-looking. Already the air was tinged with a faint scorched odor, part chemical, part meat. He didn't want to get lost among the factories and slag heaps of Birdland.

So where was he supposed to go? He stepped into the street to get a better view of the bars, scanned their tattered awnings and tawdry lights looking for some clue. He found none. But suddenly someone lurched out of one of the alleys, and Trevor's quick step backward was all that kept the scrawny figure from plowing right into him.

The guy gripped the lapels of Trevor's jacket with spidery fingers, stared imploringly up at Trevor. His face was gaunt, his huge burning eyes set in sockets so deep they looked like they'd been scooped out with a spoon. His flesh had a fibrous texture. His long black coat hung on his shoulders like a pair of broken wings. Its baggy sleeves had slid up over his wrists as he grabbed Trevor. Fresh needle marks ran up both sticklike arms as far as Trevor could see.

“Please gimme some credit, ” he hissed. “I got a big old shiny rock coming in. ”

It was Skeletal Sammy. Bobby's quintessential junkie character, all hustle and twitch and promise, animated by his addiction. This was the character Trevor had been trying to sketch at the kitchen table the day he learned he could draw. He remembered Bobby leaning over his shoulder and kissing the top of his head, whispering in his ear. You draw a mean junkie, kiddo.

He reached up and encircled Sammy's skinny wrists, gently removed Sammy's skeletal claws from his lapels. He felt an odd tenderness for this character. “Sorry, Sam, ” he said. “I don't have anything. ”

“Whaddaya mean? You're the Man, aren'cha? You got these, don'cha? ” Sammy seized Trevor's hands, held them for a long moment. His flesh was cold as morgue tiles. Trevor felt something gouging his palm. When Sammy let go, Trevor found himself holding a small glittering jewel. It looked like a diamond, but with a faint blue glow at its core. He rolled it over his palm, watched its facets catch the light.

“That's all I got, ” said Sammy. “I know it ain't much, but I'll make good later. ”

He reached into the folds of his coat and pulled out a syringe wrapped in a dirty handkerchief. The plunger was depressed, the barrel empty. The needle gleamed dully beneath a thin film of dried blood.

“Just give me a little, ” begged Sammy.

“I don't have anything. I swear. ”

Skeletal Sammy peered at Trevor as if one of them must have gone crazy and he wasn't sure which one it was. “I do know you, right? ”

“Well-” Trevor wasn't sure how to answer.

“You are an artist, right? ”

“Yes. ”

“Then c'mon. I'll pay you double tomorrow. I'll suck your dick. Anything. Just be a pal an' roll up your sleeve. ”

“What for? ”

“The red, baby. ” Sammy clutched at Trevor's sleeve. “That sweet red flowin' in your vein. ”

“You want my Wood? ”

Skeletal Sammy stared him in the eye and nodded slowly. The naked, wretched need in Sammy's face was like nothing Trevor had seen before. He remembered a phrase from William S. Burroughs. Sammy's face was an equation written in the algebra of need.

Trevor had never been any good at math. But he did know that there were two sides to every equation. If the inhabitants of this universe or dimension or comic or whatever the hell it was could get high on his bodily fluids, maybe he could extract something from them, too.

He put his hand over Sammy's, forced the diamond back into Sammy's palm.

“What if I give you some? ” he asked. “Do you know where Bobby McGee is? ”

Again that slow nod.

“Will you take me there? ”

” 'Course I will, ” Sammy said. “He's been expecting you. ”

The junkie tried to smile. It was a ghastly sight.

“Okay, then. ”

Sammy led him into one of the dark bars. The interior was both garish and squalid, with walls of filthy purple velvet and a floor unwashed for so long that Trevor felt the soles of his shoes peeling softly away from it as he walked. A sign advertising a brand of beer he'd never heard of flickered green and gold above the bar. Reflected in a dirty mirror on the opposite wall, it made a dizzy tunnel of light spiraling away into infinity. There was no bartender, no customers. The place was silent.

They sat at one of the rickety little tables. Trevor took off his pinstriped jacket, rolled up the left sleeve of his silk shirt. He saw that his scars were still open, oozing slow tears of blood. The stains didn't show on the black cloth, though the sleeve was wet with it. Sammy's eyes honed in on the blood. He looked as if he would like to lap it right off Trevor's arm.

Instead he reached into his voluminous overcoat, pulled out a length of rubber tubing, and tied it around his own arm inches above the elbow. “If I tie off ahead of time, ” he explained, “I can shoot it while it's still good an' hot. ” He reached over and stroked Trevor's hand. His touch was ambiguous, not quite sexual. “You ready? ”

“Clean your needle first. You're not sticking that dirty thing in my arm. ”

“No, that ain't where you like to stick dirty things, is it? ”

Before Trevor could fully process this remark, Sammy got up from the table, slipped behind the bar, and came back with a glass full of neat whiskey. He took out his syringe, immersed the needle in the amber liquor and swished it around several times. Then he pulled out a cheap cigarette lighter, ran its flame along the needle and let it linger on the tip. The alcohol flared up clear blue, burned off fast. Sammy glanced at Trevor. “Satisfied? ”

Trevor had no idea if this procedure really sterilized the needle, but at least the scummy-looking crust of dried blood was gone. He nodded, feeling as if somewhere during this transaction he had lost the upper hand.

Sammy bent over Trevor's arm and slid the needle into the open scar closest to the elbow. For a moment he probed, and a scintilla of pain shot through the soft meat. Then the needle found a vein and sank in deep. Sammy pulled the plunger slowly back. A dark flower of blood welled into the syringe. Trevor felt the needle shivering with each beat of his heart.

Sammy kept hold of his hand, idly stroking his wrist and playing with his fingers. But as soon as he had a full hypo, Sammy yanked the needle out of the wound. With absolutely no wasted motion he pulled up his own sleeve, stuck the needle deep into the flesh of his inner elbow, and pushed the plunger. Trevor's blood seemed to rush into his vein as if his own blood were sucking hungrily at it. Trevor saw Sammy's eyelids fluttering, the pinkish rag of his tongue glistening in his mouth. “Ohhh. . . thaasss the sweeeeet red. . . ”

Then Sammy's hands spasmed and his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed face first on the table. The hypo fell out of his arm and rolled off the edge of the table, the inside of the barrel still coated with a thin film of blood. Sammy's right hand hit the glass of whiskey and sent it spinning to the floor. Its harsh reek filled the bar.

Trevor grabbed a handful of Sammy's hair and lifted his head off the table. It felt as light as a hollow gourd. The junkie's face had gone a sick blue beneath the already-gray cast of his skin. His eyes were closed, his chin slicked with spit.

Then the handful of hair separated from Sammy's scalp like dead grass ripping out of dry dirt, and Sammy's head smacked against the tabletop and split open as easily as an overripe melon.

Shards of his fragile skull went skittering away. Much of it simply sifted to dust. His brain looked like burnt hamburger meat, desiccated and crumbling. Trevor saw a thing like a cloudy marble trailing a length of red string roll to the edge of the table. One of Sammy's eyeballs. It teetered for a long moment, then plopped moistly to the floor. There was very little blood. The tabletop quickly became littered with teeth the color of old ivory, drifts of hair gone ashen gray, dust that smelled like a freshly opened mummy case: faintly spicy, faintly rotten.

Trevor stared dumbly at the wreckage he had made of his father's cartoon character. The running joke about Skeletal Sammy had been that he could shoot anything. Morphine, Dilaudid, straight H, you name it. Junk peddlers had tried to poison him with battery acid and strychnine when he got too deep into them for credit, but Sammy just pumped these noxious substances into the old vein and came back for more.

It had taken the son of his creator-his brother, in a way — to give Sammy the kick he couldn't get twice. And if Sammy had ever known where to find Bobby, he wasn't telling now.

Trevor squeezed Sammy's thin wrist. The skin flaked away beneath his fingers until he found himself clutching little more than bone. Once more he was alone in this place that felt as empty as a junkie's promise. Trevor rolled down his sleeve, put his jacket back on, and walked out of the bar.

The street was still deserted. He chose a side street that ran alongside the factories but didn't seem to lead directly into them. He had no tears left for Sammy. He kept walking.

Zach managed to drop the empty coffee mug and curl up next to Trevor before the pain slammed into his chest. For several seconds it rendered him quite unable to breathe, and he thought that was it: he'd killed himself quick and neat with a single dose of a socially acceptable drug used by billions of people without a second thought every day of their lives.

Then his lungs hitched and he was able to suck in a shallow, agonizing little breath, then another. His heart was beating so hard it made his limbs tremble and his vision throb. He rolled closer to Trevor, hooked an arm across Trevor's chest, made sure their heads were close together on the pillow.

Every muscle in Zach's body felt pulled in too many directions, stretched too thin. He imagined the fibers pinging and snapping one by one. The pain was exquisite, electric. It burned and jittered and screamed. The mushrooms in his system only upped the ante.

A red curtain began to draw across his vision. Zach let his eyes unfocus, felt himself slipping. It occurred to him that if he blacked out and had frightening dreams, the stress on his heart might kill him before he could wake up. / don't care, he thought. If I can't find Trevor, I don't have a hell of a lot of reason to come back.

The pain lessened, then disappeared. He felt as if his weak flesh and his confining brain were dissolving, releasing him. All at once Zach found himself hovering somewhere near the center of the room, staring down at the two bodies on the bed. Their limbs were intertwined, anchoring each other. They looked defenseless, as fragile as the cast-off husks of locusts that would shatter at a touch.

This is real! thought Zach. I'm having an actual out-of-body experience! He tried to quash the thought, afraid it might jolt him back into his flesh. Instead he suddenly felt himself skimming along the ceiling, on the verge of being pulled through the wall. Zach dug in his psychic nails and fought to stay in the bedroom. He was afraid to lose sight of their bodies. And on the other side of that wall was the bathroom.

But he was already through, circling madly near the ceiling, so close he could count the cracks in the yellowed paint and the cobwebs that clogged the light fixture. The room whirled faster, faster. Now there was no ceiling, no floor, nothing but a nauseating blur of toilet and tub and sink that looked stained again with rotten blood, though it might have been the shadows. Zach felt dizzy with centrifugal force and terror.

He was in a vortex, being sucked toward the tub. For a moment he thought he would go spinning straight down the black orifice of the drain. But then he saw the glittering shards of mirror and felt himself swirling into them, fragmenting. It was like being forced through a screen, like falling into a kaleidoscope edged with razor blades.

Zach recognized the next place he saw. It was a place he knew well. It was his cradle, his home, his most addictive drugIt was cyberspace.

The writer Bruce Sterling defined cyberspace as the place where a telephone conversation seems to occur. This could be extrapolated to include the place where computer data was stored, and the place a hacker had to travel through to get the data. It had no physical reality, yet Zach had an image of it as vivid and sensibly laid out as the streets of the French Quarter. Cyberspace was part cosmos, part grid, part roller coaster.

Right after leaving his body in the bedroom, Zach had felt very light and slightly damp, like a breath of water vapor or a spare scrap of ectoplasm. Now he was utterly weightless, without physical properties. He was composed of energy, not matter. He was a creature made of information. He was traveling through cyberspace at a very high speed.

Then suddenly he wasn't, and it knocked the wind out of him.

Zach sat up with a deep burning sensation in his solar plexus, pressed his hand to his chest and touched crisp cloth. He seemed to be wearing some kind of suit. He was reclining in a padded chair, hard sticky floor under his feet, lurid light assaulting his eyeballs. As he became accustomed to it, he was able to make out rows of seats around him, slumped bodies and nodding heads, bloody images flickering across a wide screen. A movie theater.

The film appeared to be a composite of any number of works by Italian splatter film directors, but with an all-male, homosexual cast, set to a screeching saxophone soundtrack. A boy carefully rolled a condom onto another's erect penis, raised a pair of huge gleaming scissors and snipped the whole thing off, then pressed his mouth to the raw hole and drank the fountaining blood. A white man masturbated over a prostrate black man, ejaculated a pearly stream of maggots into the straining, glistening ebony back.

Zach saw that most of the other filmgoers were seated in pairs. Here and there a head bobbed gently in a lap, half-concealed by a dirty overcoat. Zach watched the movie for a few more minutes. Just as he was starting to get interested, someone slid into the aisle seat next to him and put a warm hand on his leg.

He turned with a well-rehearsed fuck off on his lips. This was a situation he'd encountered at the movies ever since he could remember, and he wasn't enough of a slut to let some anonymous pervert jack him off, hardly ever.

But instead of letting the words fly, Zach just stared. The person sitting beside him was Calvin.

The guitarist wore a charcoal suit with a black turtleneck sweater underneath. His gaunt grinning face seemed to float on the gloom of the theater. His blond hair was slicked back, giving him a vulpine look. The pressure of his fingers increased. He leaned over to whisper, and his lips brushed Zach's ear. “Do you want this as bad as I do? ”

No, I just want Trevor, thought Zach. He opened his mouth to say so, and what came out was “Hell, yes. ” Then Calvin's mouth was attacking Zach's, Calvin's hand was sliding up to his crotch, tugging at his zipper, freeing his eager, treacherous dick. Calvin's fingers squeezed and stroked him expertly. Zach wrapped his arms around Calvin's neck and kissed back hard. Their tongues exchanged molten secrets.

This was all we ever wanted from each other anyway, Zach thought, a down-and-dirty, no-strings-attached fuck. What was so wrong with that? He couldn't remember why they had stopped the first time.

The skin of his balls was tightening, his dick aching and throbbing. Zach broke the kiss and gasped for breath. Over Calvin's shoulder he caught a glimpse of the movie screen. A hand was sliding up and down the shaft of a penis he recognized as his own. The camera panned back until he could see a tangle of naked limbs, including an arm whose biceps was tattooed with a little cartoon character Zach could just make out as Krazy Kat. He guessed Mr. Natural hadn't been invented yet in this universe. Well, he thought incoherently, Krazy Kat was a fag.

The camera zoomed back in on the hand. Its quickening rhythm matched Calvin's. Zach felt himself getting ready to let go hard. The screen filled with glistening purple flesh, huge slippery fingers. Then come was pulsing from the enormous lips of the movie penis, and from his own aching dick as well.

But Zach saw only what was happening onscreen. The come made a deadly rainbow arc in the air, landed on the hand, and began to dissolve the skin. Tiny holes appeared where it hit, sizzling and spreading, reducing the layers of flesh and muscle to blackened lace. The matter dripped off the framework of the bones, oozed down the shaft of the penis. Still the huge skeletal fingers stroked. And still Calvin's hand moved in his lap.

Calvin leaned in for another kiss and Zach saw his face, no longer just gaunt but emaciated. Zach shrank back against the seat as Calvin's skin blossomed with purple lesions like the ones he had seen on his own face in the bathroom mirror. Calvin's tongue was a dead dry sponge thrusting between his lips, questing toward Zach's mouth, seeking moisture.

Then it wasn't Calvin at all; it was the clerk from the convenience store in Mississippi. Leaf. Those elegant cheekbones were hideously exaggerated now; those honey-colored eyes were like chips of topaz set in a ruined mosaic. His lips twitched as he leaned toward Zach. He stroked Zach's thigh with a disintegrating hand.

“Oh, ” he whispered, “just come over here and let's fuck. . . ”

Then he was the person before that. And then he was the person before that. And then she was the person before that. And they just kept changing, and they just got worse. . .

Zach shoved himself out of his seat and stumbled backward down the row. He tripped over a tangle of feet and turned to apologize, but the pair of faces that tilted up to him were blotched with purple, horribly withered. He saw his lover pushing itself up, supporting itself on the seat backs, making its way slowly toward him. Above the blaring soundtrack Zach heard labored breathing, dry, painful coughing. All over the theater other figures were beginning to stir, to rise.

Zach turned and ran. He vaulted over the tangled legs, sprinted up the aisle, and burst out into the lobby. A set of glass doors led out onto the street. At the last second before he grasped the handle, Zach knew they would be locked. He would be trapped here in the lobby with the zombies coming for him, and when they got him they would smear him across the glass like a crushed strawberry. He had seen enough movies to know what happened when the zombies got you.

But the doors weren't locked, and Zach slammed through them at high speed. On the far side of the street, pausing to push his glasses up and catch his breath, he glanced across at the theater. Its facade was lavishly decorated in art deco tiles and marble, deep crimson, jade green, jet black. The marquee was wrought of fluted, gleaming chrome like a 1930s dream of the future. On its sign was spelled out-in red block letters a foot high-THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS.

“Cute, ” he snarled, and started walking fast, looking behind him every half block or so. The street remained empty. He guessed the zombies were quarantined in the theater.

Zach held his hands up in front of his face and stared at the palms. The lines in them were dark pink, healthy-looking enough though slightly damp with sweat. He had always heard that if you were really sick, the lines in your palms turned gray.

But he felt fine. Was the place trying to scare him with its rotting mirror images and its wank-house zombies? Or was it trying to warn him of something?

If he ever got out of here, Zach decided, he was going straight to the nearest health clinic and getting a blood test. He didn't want one, but he thought maybe it was time to start considering things other than what he wanted.

Soon he was far from the theater. The deserted streets felt half-familiar. This place wasn't New Orleans, but Zach thought New Orleans had been used to flavor it like a spice. He could see it in the gas lamps on the corners, the high curbs, even a cast-iron balcony or a gate leading into a shadowy courtyard here and there. The night air was cool on his face, though it smelled nothing like the alcoholic haze of the French Quarter. The odor here was more like Toxic Alley, the poisonous stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a faint ghost of chemicals and burning oil.

He saw a fountain bubbling fitfully in a tiny concrete park and stopped to rest. The fountain struck him as odd, and after a moment Zach realized why: there were no coins on the bottom, not even pennies. He had never seen a public fountain without pennies on the bottom. Instead there seemed to be a few small faceted jewels, so translucent in the clear water that Zach could hardly be sure they were there at all.

Well, you're in a hallucination now, he thought. And it isn't even your own. Better get used to seeing some weird shit.

He stared at his feet and suddenly registered that they were clad in shoes he'd never seen before, two-toned wingtip loafers polished within an inch of their lives. For the first time he thought to check out the rest of his outfit.

Some kind of suit, he'd thought in the theater. But what a suit! It was woven from nubbly-textured cloth of the palest shell pink, cut loose and baggy, with vast lapels. Underneath he had on a cream-colored shirt and an extravagant red silk tie with a tiny paisley figure. Zach felt something on his head, reached up to investigate. A beret. Wouldn't you just know it. Even the lenses of his glasses seemed to have taken on a smoky hipster tint.

Birdland might try to fuck with you at every turn, Zach thought, but at least you got to dress cool.

He heard a ripple of music nearby. The clear voice of a saxophone, leisurely rising, then descending. The sound was getting closer. By this time Zach would not have been surprised to see Charlie Parker (or his zombie) come swaying round the corner, eyes shut tight and forehead wrinkled, blowing the horn as he walked. Bird used to come onstage like that, Trevor had told him, after the rest of the band had already been playing for an hour or so. He would start somewhere way off in the bowels of the club, and the other musicians would gradually fall in with him as they heard his approach, until by the time he walked onstage Bird was leading the band.

But what rounded the corner instead was, in the most literal sense of the term, a solo instrument. Walking on four multi-jointed, chitinous-looking legs, depressing its own keys with two equally insectile three-fingered hands, brass gleaming through a web of scuffs and scratches, came an unaccompanied alto saxophone.

“Oh now, ” Zach muttered, “this is just silly. ”

The music stopped, and a low fluting voice spoke out of the instrument's bell. “Hey, cat-you in a cartoon, dig? Cartoons is s'posed to be silly. Here, have a stick of tea and you be gettin' silly too. ”

Zach could see no speaking apparatus anywhere on the thing, nothing that vaguely resembled lips or vocal cords, yet the voice did not sound synthesized. The alto reached one of those spiny claws deep into the curve of its bell and pulled out a fat twisted cigarette. This it tossed to Zach, who caught it eagerly.

“Pick up on that tea, ” the sax advised him. “Don't be lettin' zombies bring you down. They ain't cool or viperish neither. Not like us. ”

“Hey, thanks. ”

“De nada, ” said the instrument suavely. “Any descendant of Hieronymus is a friend o' mine. ” It began to noodle off down the street, playing a few bars of “Ornithology—”

“Wait! ” Zach stuck the joint in his pocket and hurried after it. “Do you know where any of the McGees are? Trevor? Bobby? ”

The alto switched to “Lullaby of Birdland” but did not otherwise reply. It had a half-block start on Zach, and it always seemed to stay just a little too far ahead of him, dropping to all fours and scuttling like a roach on those barbed legs, still playing itself with its spiky little hands, the gay tune spiraling behind. Zach's fancy new shoes pinched his feet when he tried to hurry. He could not catch up. Eventually the thing disappeared down an alley and lost him altogether.

Now Zach was in a narrow street lined on both sides with dark buildings that seemed to lean forward over the sidewalk, swaying slightly. Many of the buildings had old-fashioned stoops and stairs leading up to recessed entryways that might have once been elegant, but all were in a state of advanced decay. He saw fanlights with the stained glass broken out, only a few shards remaining like jagged multicolored teeth in the frames. Overhead he could barely make out a purple slice of sky. The place was deserted. Zach reached into his jacket, knowing somehow that there would be a streamlined silver lighter tucked in a pocket. There was.

He leaned against a stoop, stuck the joint in his mouth, and lit up. An acrid, bitter taste filled his mouth, nothing remotely like marijuana. He burst out coughing. “A stick of tea, ” the alto had said, and Zach assumed it was talking beatnik slang. Now he remembered a panel from Birdland of cat-headed smugglers at a river dock, unloading bales of Darjeeling and Earl Grey under cover of darkest night. It really was tea.

Well, fuck it. Caffeine had started him on this journey; maybe it would preserve him. Zach took another hit off the stick of tea and found himself getting a delicious dizzy high, as good as that from the sticky green bud Dougal used to sell in the French Market. He felt a sudden wave of homesickness, wondered if he would ever see New Orleans again.

But if he didn't get his ass moving and find Trevor, he might never even see Missing Mile again. Zach took a couple more tokes, bent over to snuff the joint on the sidewalk. And then all at once a premonition hit him, stronger than any he'd ever had before: Get the fuck out of here. Now.

Zach began to straighten up, heard a door slam and heavy footsteps pounding down the stairs behind him. He dropped the joint, but before he could turn, a hard shove sent him sprawling across the sidewalk. He managed to get his hands under him and his chin up fast enough not to break any teeth, but he felt the healing cut on his lip burst open, saw fresh blood spatter the cement. His palms screamed agony. He felt sidewalk grit working its way into raw subcutaneous layers of flesh.

“You stupid fuckin' kid! Leave you alone for five minutes and I find you smokin' dope on the street corner! ” A boot ground into the small of his back. The voice was familiar, deep and faintly gravelly. Shit, no, please, no, thought Zach. Make me fuck a zombie. Let me watch my own face rotting in the mirror. Please, anything but my dad.

Zach twisted away from the boot. A large hand wrapped around his wrist and hauled him up. He found himself staring up into the pale exasperated face of Joe Bosch, and remembered one of the scariest things about his father: even when he was beating the crap out of someone, usually his wife or son, his face never lost that wideeyed, slightly harassed expression. It was as if he sincerely believed he was inflicting this damage for the good of all concerned, and was only pissed that they couldn't see it that way.

When Zach left home, his father had been a foot taller than he, skinny but muscular. Since then Zach had grown six inches and gained thirty pounds. Joe must have kept growing too, for he still seemed just as big. Zach had always looked very much like his mother. He had her pallid coloring, her slender bones, her narrow nose and sulky underlip and thick blue-black hair. The almond shape of his eyes was hers too. Joe didn't look so different; he was fair-skinned and dark-haired with sharp intense features, and could have been Evangeline's brother. But Evangeline's eyes were Cajun black. Joe's were the color of jade.

His father's relentless stare bored into him, dissected him, mirrored him. Zach could not even try to pull away. He remembered the consequences of evasive action all too well. The trick of being beaten up was to take what you couldn't avoid and show just enough pain to appease their anger, but not enough to make them want more. If you awakened their lust for pain, they would make you bleed, break, burn.

But there was one thing Zach had never been able to control, one thing that had gotten him hurt more times than he could remember, and that was his smart mouth.

He looked straight into Joe's eyes, wondering if there was anything of his real father in there or if this was a phantom like Calvin in the movie theater, a distillation of Birdland and mushrooms and his own fear.

“I know you can kick my ass, ” he said, “but can you talk to me? ”

“Talk? ” Joe sneered. Zach saw a gold tooth, remembered a night when he was four or five, his father staggering in with blood pouring from his mouth. It looked as if he had been vomiting the stuff. He'd been in a bar fight over some woman, and Evangeline had screamed at him all night.

“Sure, Zach-a-reee. ” His mother had named him after her own grandfather. Joe hated the name, always spoke it that way, with a taunting twist to his lips. “We can talk. What do you wanna talk about? ”

“I've got all kinds of shit I want to talk about. ” Zach had never dared say these things to his father. If he didn't say them now, he never would. “Tell me why you hate me so much. Tell me why I have belt scars on my back that haven't faded in five years. Tell me how come I could leave home and support myself at fourteen but you couldn't even deal with your fucking life at thirty-three! ”

He tensed, expecting to get slapped. But Joe only smiled. It turned his eyes brilliant and dangerous. “You wanna know all that? Then take a look at this. ”

Joe stuck his free hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a used condom. Holding it by the rim with thumb and forefinger as if his own seed were distasteful to him, he thrust it in Zach's face. The reservoir tip was split open, and a long thin string of come dangled from it, glistening in the purple light. The Bosch family heirloom.

“This is why I hate you, ” said Joe. “I didn't want a kid any more than you want one right now. I could've done anything with my life. Your momma didn't want you because she was scared of being pregnant and too lazy to take care of you once you got there. But I had a future, and you killed it. ”

“BULLSHIT! ” Zach felt his face flushing, his eyes burning with anger. “That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! I'm just your excuse for being a failure. Nobody made you—”

Joe jammed the rubber between Zach's lips and deep into his mouth. The thing slithered over his tongue, squeaked nastily against his teeth. Zach was so startled that he almost sucked it right down his throat. For a moment his father's fingers scrabbled over his tongue, hard and dirty; then they withdrew, and there was only the slimy feel of the rubber, its latex-and-dead-fish flavor.

Zach felt bile rising in his throat. He twisted his face away from Joe's hand and spat the thing out on the sidewalk where it lay like a severed skin in a pool of spit. The taste of Joe's come still filled his mouth, like sulfur and salt and murdered dreams.

“Swallow it, ” Joe told him. “It could have been you. ”

Zach felt his mind beginning to drift away on a thin tether. “This isn't happening, ” he said. “You aren't real. ”

“Oh yeah? ” said Joe. “Then I guess this won't hurt. ” He cocked his right arm. Zach saw the flash of a big gold ring an instant before the fist smashed into his face.

The pain was like a sunburst exploding through his head. Zach inhaled a freshet of blood. Behind his eyelids he saw a sudden flare of electric blue. He'd read that when you saw that color, it meant your brain had just banged against the inside of your skull.

Joe hit him again and his lips smeared wetly across his teeth, soft skin splitting and shredding. This made the time Trevor had punched him look like a love tap. Joe let go of his arm and Zach crumpled to the sidewalk. He couldn't open his eyes, though hot tears were searing them. He curled into a fetal position and wrapped his arms around his head. His father was screaming at him, half sobbing.

“You goddamn smartass BRAT. Always thought you were smarter than me. You and that CUNT, with your pretty faces. How pretty are you gonna be NOW? How smart are you gonna be with your fuckin' BRAINS STOMPED INTO THE SIDEWALK? ”

Joe's boot connected with the base of Zach's spine, sent a hot wave of pain up his body. He's going to kill me, Zach thought. He's going to kick me to death right here in the street. Will my body back at the house die too? Will Trevor wake up next to me with my head bashed in and think he did it?

The idea was unbearable. Zach rolled over, saw the boot drawing back to kick him again, grabbed his father's ankle and yanked hard. If Joe went down, Zach knew in that instant, he wasn't getting up again. Zach would kill him if possible-with a bottle or a chunk of brick if he could grab one, with his bare hands if he couldn't. Fuck not fighting back; all bets were off.

But Joe didn't go down. Zach managed to throw him off balance and he stumbled, then recovered with a great roar of rage and drove the toe of his boot into Zach's shoulder. The muscles instantly contracted into a shrieking knot of agony. Well, that's it, Zach thought through the pain. That was my chance and I blew it and now he's just gonna kill me worse. He could already taste the dirty boot heel plowing into his mouth, his teeth splintering, blood spraying over his tongue.

But instead of stomping his face, Joe reached down, grabbed Zach's arm, and pulled him back up. It was obvious that Joe would be perfectly willing to yank his shoulder out of its socket if Zach resisted. “You're smart enough to get into places but not smart enough to know when you're not wanted, ” he hissed into Zach's face. His breath was scented with peppermint and rotgut gin. “You're meddlin' here and I'm gonna stop you. Don't fight me or I'll put out one of your eyes. I swear it. ”

Zach believed him. He remembered a time just before he had left home for good that Joe had thrown him against the wall and held a lighted cigarette less than an inch from his right eye, threatening to burn it if he blinked. Evangeline had snatched the cigarette, taken a slap across the face that knocked her down, then cussed Zach to ribbons for having provoked his father with some smartass remark. Later he had noticed that his eyelashes were singed.

Joe pulled out the poor man's weapon he had always carried on the streets of New Orleans, a knotted sock half full of pennies. The black wool was stiff with dried blood. He slapped it against his palm thoughtfully, then grinned and swung it around his head, winding up for the blow.

Trevor, Zach promised silently, if I see you again-no, WHEN I see you, I'm taking you away to the cleanest, whitest, bluest, warmest beach you ever saw, and I'll buy you all the paper and ink you want, and we'll keep each other as sane as we want to be and love each other as long as we're alive. We'll let go of our pasts and start making our future.

Then his father's slap plowed into his skull. Joe hit him so hard that the sock split right open. In the instant before his mind went out, Zach saw its contents raining down around his head, shimmering, sparkling.

Not pennies. Tiny diamonds.

Trevor kept following the street he had chosen. It led him deeper into the factories where he wasn't sure he wanted to go, but there were no cross streets anymore, and he would not return the way he had come. There was nothing in those bars for him, nothing but the bottles frosted with dust and filled with poison, nothing but Skeletal Sammy's crumbling bones.

He passed a shining, bubbling pool of black liquid enclosed by a chain-link fence, a vast decrepit building with white steam billowing from hundreds of broken windows, a railyard where rusty boxcars lay scattered like children's blocks. There was a weird toxic beauty to the landscape. Like alien terrain, Trevor thought at first; but this desolation was peculiarly human.

His fingers itched for pencil and paper. He could actually feel the satisfying sensation of the graphite tip gliding over the page, the slight textured catch of the paper's grain, the minute sympathetic vibration in the bones of his hand. He thrust both hands into his pockets and walked on.

The street began to curve away in a strange perspective, as if the horizon line didn't quite mesh with the sky. He saw the corner of another empty lot up ahead, then realized it wasn't empty after all as the edge of a building became visible, set back farther from the street than the others. Something else was odd about the building, and after a moment Trevor realized what. It was made of wood. The structure he saw was a wooden porch, here in this industrial wasteland of steel and concrete.

It cast a flat black shadow on the ground, the shadow of a peaked roof and spindly railings, like any of a million porches on a million rambling old farmhouses. You saw them plenty driving around rural areas of the South. You didn't see them much, though, in the industrial sections of vast gray deserted cities.

A few more steps and his conscious mind saw what his back brain had known all along. It was the house from Violin Road, set down stark and solid in the middle of this necrophiliac dreamscape, the same as it had ever been, hardly looking a part of the world it now inhabited.

If not the seed of Birdland, the house was surely its rotten core; if not an actual part of this dead world, the house was surely its source. Trevor knew he was going back in there now. If he died this time, it would be as if he had never lived these twenty years. If he didn't, then the rest of his life belonged to him.

And to Zach, if he still wanted any part of it. It's the house where you lost your virginity after a quarter century, too, Trevor reminded himself. But that was another source of its power over him, as visceral as the deaths.

Remember, he thought dreamily, you still have plenty of time to get down to Birdland. . .

But now there was no more time. Now he was all the way down.

Without its yardful of weeds and green veil of kudzu the house looked stark, broken-backed, sculpted of splinter and shadow. The windows rippled with opaque colors, reflecting some light Trevor could not see. As he crossed the featureless lot they flared violet, then faded to bruise.

He mounted the steps, pushed the listing door open, and went in. The living room was just as he remembered it: ugly chair and sofa sagging but not completely gone to mold and mildew; the turntable surrounded by crates of records. His heart missed a beat as he saw another figure in the dim room.

Crouching near the hall doorway was a slender woman in a loose white camisole and a red skirt with matching elbow-length gloves. Long black hair spilled over her shoulders and down her back, rippling with unearthly blue highlights.

Her head swiveled and her face tilted up to him: pale, sharp-featured, startlingly lovely. Her enormous dark eyes were slightly tilted, smudged with shadows. Trevor realized three things at once: the woman looked just like Zach; she was holding something in her cupped hands; and she was wearing only a white one-piece shift, no gloves. The skirt was so stained with blood that he had thought it a separate piece of clothing. Her arms were swathed to the elbows in gore.

She raised her hands and showed him what she held. Trevor saw a gelatinous glob of blood shot through with dark veins, the black dot of an eye, five tiny curled fingers.

“I didn't have the money for a doctor, ” she said, “so I hit myself in the stomach until it bled. I just wanted the damn thing out of me. Do you hear? Out! ”

Trevor advanced on her, stared her down. A quick hot vein of anger pulsed in his head. Zach had suffered unforgivably at the hands of this woman. “You did not, ” he said. “You didn't want him but you had him anyway, and you two tortured him as long as you could get away with it. That was nineteen years ago and your baby's doing fine. Where are you now, you fucking evil bitch? ”

The woman crumpled back against the door frame. The bloody mess slid out of her hands. Trevor had to resist the urge to scoop the lonely detritus into his own hands and sob over it. That mangled thing wasn't Zach, couldn't be. It was only a neverborn phantom.

He remembered that Zach's mother was named Evangeline, like the poem. “Go away, Evangeline, ” he said. “Get out of my house. I hate you. ”

Her huge stricken eyes settled on Trevor. He couldn't tell if she was hearing him; she hadn't responded directly to anything he said. “You're a ghost, ” he told her, “and you're not even the right one. ”

Her head fell back. Her hands curled into claws. A shudder went through her, and for a moment the outlines of her body blurred, as if she were passing through some unseen membrane. Then all at once her hair was turning to cornsilk shot through with streaks of darker gold, matted with blood. Her features grew softer, rounder, her breasts heavier. Her arms hung by her sides, a mass of blood and bruise. Trevor found himself looking at his own mother, Rosena McGee, as he had discovered her that morning.

He remembered the first day he had come back to the house, when he switched on the light in the studio and saw Bobby's drawing of this scene, identical to the one Trevor had done on the bus. At the time Trevor thought maybe Bobby had drawn it before her death, as a sort of dry run. But it was too exact; with Rosena struggling, he never could have landed the blows as precisely on her flesh as he had done on paper.

No. He had killed her, and then he had sat down here with his sketchbook and drawn her. Then he had tacked the drawing to the studio wall before he went in and killed Didi. Trevor had no proof of this sequence of events, but he could see it all too clearly. Bobby hunched on the floor before her broken body, hand flying over the paper, eyes flickering with manic intensity from Rosena's dead face to the page and back again. But why?

His mother's eyes were open, the whites filmed with blood. There were deep gouges in her forehead, her left temple, the center of her chest. All had bled heavily. From the head wounds had also trickled some clear substance- cerebral fluid, he supposed-that cut pale tracks through the blood. Trevor noticed that unlike himself and Skeletal Sammy, Rosena was not in forties-noir costume; she wore the same embroidered jeans and cotton dashiki top she'd had on the night she died.

What the hell did that mean? What the hell did any of it mean? He suddenly wanted Zach here with him as badly as he had ever wanted anything. Zach could unravel intricate patterns of logic, perhaps explain them. And if there was no logic in Birdland, then Zach could hold him, give him somewhere to hide his face so he would not have to keep looking into his mother's bloody eyes.

No. This was what he had come for. He had to see everything.

Rosena's body blocked half the doorway. Trevor edged by, careful not to let his leg brush her. He could picture the stiff sprawl of her limbs if he were to knock her over, could hear the hollow sound her head would make hitting the floor. When he was nearly past, he could also imagine how it would feel if she reached out and wrapped a hand around his ankle. But Rosena remained motionless. He could not believe that she would ever harm him.

He pushed open the door of Didi's room and looked through the crack but did not enter the room. There was a tiny body sprawled on the mattress. Even in the dim light Trevor could make out the dark stain surrounding the head.

Had Bobby drawn Didi after killing him too? Maybe, but Trevor didn't think so. It would have been getting very late by then, and Bobby didn't want to see another dawn. But where had he gone next? Straight into the bathroom with his rope, or somewhere else?

So many questions. Trevor was suddenly disgusted with himself for asking them when there seemed to be no answers. What the fuck did it matter what Bobby had done? What difference could it make to him now? He should never have eaten those mushrooms, should never have catapulted himself over into Birdland. He had left Zach behind, and he didn't know how to find his way back, and everything here seemed like a senseless dead end.

Maybe he was hallucinating it all. This world seemed as tangible as the other: he had felt the sting of Sammy's needle going into his arm, smelled the fresh blood and raw sewage stink of the bodies. But he was on an unfamiliar drug. Who knew what could happen? Maybe he would enter his bedroom and see his own body asleep on the mattress, curled around Zach. Maybe he could get back through.

You came for answers, he reminded himself. Did you think they would be written on the walls in blood? Are you really ready to go back to the real house, to the empty house? Are you ready to stop trying to fit yourself like an odd piece into the puzzle of your family's deaths, to fly away with Zach, to start your own life?

He didn't know. There seemed to be an invisible barrier between him and all he saw, as if the house were letting him look but not touch, telling him You were never a part of this as if he needed to hear it again. The dead were linked in a terrible intimacy, and Trevor was the living, the outsider. You never had anything to do with it. Bobby left you out completely. They all left you. Go back to the one person who cared enough to stay.

Trevor found himself standing before the closed door of his own room. He felt as if he were walking a thin line between his past and his future. If he fell, he would have neither. Balance was everything.

As if in a dream, Trevor saw his hand reaching out, his fingers closing on the knob. Very slowly, he opened the door.

The man sitting on the edge of the bed looked up. His eyes locked with Trevor's, ice-blue irises rimmed in black, pupils hugely dilated. His gaunt face and his bare chest were smeared with blood. His ginger hair was matted with it. In his right hand he held a rusty hammer, its head glistening thick sticky red, its claw a nightmare of tangled blond hair, shredded skin, pulverized brain and bone. Slow rivulets of blood ran down the handle, coursed in dark veinlike patterns over his arm.

Trevor was dimly aware of someone else in the room, a small still form on the mattress, breathing deeply, shrouded in covers. But he could not focus on it; the membrane seemed to shimmer and grow opaque at that point, like a wrinkle in the fabric of this world.

For a long, long moment he and Bobby simply stared at each other. Their faces were more alike than Trevor had remembered. Then Bobby's trance seemed to break a little, and his lips moved. What came out was a broken whisper, hoarse with whiskey and sorrow. “Who are you? ”

“I'm your son. ”

“Didi and Rosena—”

“You killed them. You know me, Bobby. ” Trevor advanced a few steps into the room. “You better know me. I haven't stopped thinking about you for twenty years. ”

“Oh, Trev. . . ” The hammer fell out of Bobby's hand, landed with a heavy thunk on the floorboards less than an inch from his bare toes, but Bobby didn't flinch. Trevor saw tears coursing down his face, washing away some of the blood. “Is it really you? ”

“Go look in the mirror if you don't believe me. ”

“No... no... I know who you are. ” Bobby's shoulders slumped. He looked ancient, desolate. “How old are you? Nineteen? Twenty? ”

“Twenty-five. ”

“Do you still draw? ”

“Goddammit! ” Trevor remembered the drift of shredded paper on the mattress, the pillow, their bodies. “You ought to know! ”

Very slowly, Bobby shook his head. “No, Trev. I don't know anything anymore. ” He looked up again, and Trevor saw by the naked pain in Bobby's face that it was true. A terrible suspicion drifted like a cold mist into his mind.

“Why didn't you kill me? ” Trevor asked. He had been waiting so long to say those words. Now they sounded flat and lifeless.

Bobby shrugged helplessly. Trevor recognized the gesture; it was one of his own. “I just kept sitting here, ” Bobby went on, “looking at your drawings on the wall, wondering how in hell I could hit you with that thing, wondering how I could bury that chunk of metal in your sweet, smart brain, thinking how easy they'd been compared to you. They were like anatomy lessons. The body is a puzzle of flesh and blood and bone. . . you understand? ”

Trevor nodded. He thought of the times he had wanted to keep biting Zach, to keep pulling and tearing at Zach's flesh just to see what was under there. Then he thought of fighting at the Boys' Home, of slamming the older kid's head against the tiles of the shower stall. Of tendrils of blood swirling through warm water.

“And when you kill the people you love, you watch what your hands are doing, you feel the blood hitting your face, but all the time you're thinking Why am I doing this? And then you get it. It's because you love them, because you want all their secrets, not just the ones they decide to show you. And after you take them apart, you know everything. ”

“Then why. . . ” Trevor could hardly speak. It was true what he had suspected all along: Bobby hadn't loved him enough to kill him.

“Why did I leave you out? Because I had to. Because I sat here watching you sleep, thinking all that. And then you came in, just now.

“And I can't do it, Trev. If I have any talent, any gift left at all, it's in you now. I can kill them, I can kill myself, but I can't kill that. ”

He picked up the hammer again, stood, and walked toward Trevor.

“Wait! ” Trevor put out his hands, tried to touch Bobby. Bobby stopped just out of reach, and his hands closed on air. “Are you seeing... Is this. . . ” He didn't know how to articulate what he wanted to ask. “What about Birdland? What happened to it for you? ”

“Birdland is a machine oiled with the blood of artists, ” Bobby said dreamily. His tone was as detached as if he were giving a lecture. He came closer, held out the dripping hammer. “Birdland is a mirror that reflects our deaths. Birdland never existed. ”

“But it's right outside that window! ” Trevor yelled. “It's where I just came from! ”

“Yes, ” said Bobby, “but I stay in here. ”

He pressed the hammer into Trevor's hand. Then he spread his arms wide and wrapped Trevor in an embrace that felt like warm damp fog. His outlines were blurring. His flesh was softening, melting into Trevor's.

“NO! DON'T GO! TELL ME WHY YOU DID IT! TELL ME!!! ”

“You don't really want to know why, ” he heard Bobby's voice say. “You just want to know what it felt like. ”

Trevor felt the viscous fog seeping into his bones, curling up in his skull, blotting out his vision. He felt blood running down the hammer handle, coursing warm and sticky over his fingers, mingling with the blood from his own scars. From the corner of his eye he saw his drawings fluttering on the wall like trapped wings.

“Tell me, ” he whispered.

You're an artist, the voice whispered back. It was deep inside his head now. Go find out for yourself,

Then the world blinked out like a blown bulb.