They stopped to look at the trinkets laid out on tables in a small street market on a yellow boulevard that intersected theirs. A trader with leathery skin and blue, chapped lips clasped his hands and greeted them eagerly. He stared at Lulu. "I see you've been doing some renovations, my dear." He took a bite of a juicy, green-skinned fruit. "What will you take for her?"

Spyder didn't bother looking up at the man, but kept studying the charms on the table. "She's not for sale."

The merchant leaned in close, speaking in intimate tones. "You think I won't keep her well because she lacks eyes. Don't worry. Those are not the organs that interest me."

Spyder tucked his hands in the waist of his jeans, pushing back his jacket to make sure the man saw Apollyon's knife. "I missed that. Say it again," Spyder told the man.

The merchant's gaze flickered from the knife to Spyder's eyes. "You misunderstood me, friend. There is no business here," said the merchant, licking his thin lips. "Thank you. Have a good day." He walked quickly away.

Spyder turned to Count Non, who loomed close behind him. "I was doing all right, you know. I don't need you doing Hulk Hogan over my shoulder."

"Perhaps neither of us frightened him," said the Count. "Perhaps for once he heard his own words and was appalled."

Lulu said nothing, but swept her arm across the merchant's table, knocking his wares to the pavement.

"Yeah, he seemed like the real reflective type," said Spyder.

"'God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.'" The Count laughed. "I like you, little brother. You disguise your nobler qualities to play the fool."

"Uh, thanks."

"Would you take some advice from someone with a bit more experience of the world?"

"You don't look that much older than me."

"Trust me. I am."

"Are we talking Paul McCartney old or Bob Hope old?"

"More like those mountains in the distance."

"Damn. You must get all the senior discounts."

"Be quiet," said the Count. "It's not necessary to fill every moment with your own voice. Silence terrifies you. You see your own existence as so tenuous that you're afraid you'll pop like a bubble if, at every opportunity, you don't remind the world that you're alive. But wisdom begins in silence. In learning to listen. To words and to the world. Trust me. You won't disappear. And, in time, you might find that you've grown into something unexpected."

"What?"

"A man," said the Count. He started out of the market and back to the main boulevard. Spyder and Lulu followed.

"Don't feel badly. This is just a chat between friends, not a reprimand. If you feel lost and foolish sometimes, don't worry about that, either. All great men begin as fools. It's one of life's little jokes."

"Spyder, he just called you a joke of the universe. Kick his ass," said Lulu. She put an arm around Spyder's shoulders. Count Non smiled at her.

"Food for thought," said Spyder. "We'll cover more ground if we split up for a while. I'll meet you back at the corner where we started."

"I was just fucking with you, man," said Lulu, but Spyder was already rounding the corner in the other direction.

Thirty-One

The Future

In a street of nightmares, Spyder saw the Black Clerks.

The street had been roofed over, like the souks of Morocco. The sound attracted Spyder to the spot, a strange and deliberate animal wail-screams extracted with mechanical precision.

Inside the dark, cramped street was a gallery of horrors. Men turned over bonfires on huge metal spits. Women crushed under rolling boulders studded with surgical blades. Children screamed as spiders and oversized ants tore at their young flesh. Terrified people were tormented up and down the length of the street, shrieking and tearing at the arms of passersby as they were chased by snarling animals or angry mobs. Spyder took a breath and reminded himself that none of this was real. It was just the collective memories of bad dreams, the night terrors these poor saps could never forget. It reminded him of paintings by Bruegel and Goya, and, while he tried to work his way around the thought and not let it invade his consciousness, the memories of the paintings made him think of the underworld. If this is what Hell was going to be like, Spyder wasn't sure he could take it. Of course, he was going to be blindfolded so, unlike here, he wouldn't have to actually look at Hell. It was a small comfort, but Spyder was ready for any comfort he could get.

At the far end of the street, Spyder spotted the Black Clerks. At first, he took them to be part of another nightmare and stopped to watch them pulling the guts out of a cop who had been crucified across a writhing pile of drug-starved junkies, their withered limbs (oozing pus and blood from running sores) strained against the barbed wire that held them together. The head Clerk, the one who always held the reptile-skin ledger, looked at Spyder and beckoned him over.

"You are quite a long way from home?" said the Clerk, in his peculiar singsong cadence.

"You see me. I thought you were someone's bad dream."

"We're as real as you?"

"How about him? Is he real, too?" asked Spyder, inclining his head toward the tormented cop.

"He thought he could escape us," said the Clerk. "Sometimes it is not enough to take what is ours from the body, but to insinuate ourselves in the mind and memory. A warning and object lesson for others? This is our burden."

Spyder started to walk away.

"I hope you aren't running away, trying to cheat providence?"

"No way, Jose. I'm true blue," said Spyder.

"You don't wish to stay and watch us work?"

One of the Clerks had placed an elaborate metal brace into the policeman's open mouth and was studiously sawing off his lower jaw.

"Why would I want to see that?"

"Because you're lying. And most people want to know their future."

Spyder backed away and quickly left the street of nightmares.

Thirty-Two

Dominions

Before this world, there were other worlds. Before this universe, there were other universes. Before the gods you know now, there were plenty of other gods.

Gods like to think of themselves as eternal. It's what gets them through the eons, but there are only two true eternals: birth and death. Everything else is junk washed up on the beach. The tide goes out and the pretty pink shells, the gum wrappers and the dead jellyfish are all washed away. Gods and universes come and go this way, too, but a living god knows some tricks. A god can mold energy and matter into anything it wants, or nothing at all. Gods can appear in an instant. Gods can disappear faster than the half-life of Thulium-145.

To save themselves, gods can scheme and they can hide. Some gods learned to hold their breath and float like kelp in the elemental chaos that rules the roost when one universe ends and the next hasn't quite kicked in.

Each of these trickster gods thought she or he alone had outwitted Creation by crouching in shadows of the universal attic. Then a young God called Jehovah took a band of rebel angels and tossed them, like week-old fish, from his kingdom into the dark between the worlds. As the burning angels fell, the old gods laughed and heard each other. For the first in a long time, they knew they weren't alone.

Worlds collapsed as the old gods, called the Dominions, got to know each other and learn one another's favorite games. Galaxies flickered and went out like cheap motel light bulbs. Whole Spheres of existence burned like phosphorous. Though this took a few million years in human terms, it was just something to do over lunch for the Dominions.

But the universe had its own agenda. When the Dominions tried to slip back into our universe from their refuge in chaos, they took a header out of the starry firmament, every bit as violent and humiliating as Lucifer's fall from Heaven. Not coincidentally, the Dominions fell along the same path as the exiled angels, straight into Hell. But unlike Lucifer's hordes, they didn't stop there. The mass of these beings was so great, that they fell through Hell out the other side, into a dead universe, one whose last echo hadn't yet faded away.