'Maybe we should stop this conversation now,' Will said, putting Genghis out of his lap and getting to his feet, 'before you start exorcizing me.'

She lightly laughed at this, but without much conviction. 'It's certainly been nice talking with you,' she said, her sudden formality a certain sign that she was not going to reveal anything more.

'You will keep working with Patrick?''Of course,' she said, escorting him to the door. 'You didn't think I was going to give up on him just because we'd had a few sour words? It's my responsibility to do whatever I can do. Not just for him, for me. I'm on a journey of my own. That's why it's a little confusing when I meet someone like you on the road.' They were at the door. 'Well, good luck,' she said, shaking Will's hand. 'Maybe we'll meet again one of these days.'And with that she ushered him onto the step, and without waiting for a reply, closed the door.

i

He walked most of the way home. It took him almost five hours, his trek fuelled by Hershey bars and doughnuts, washed down with a carton of milk, all consumed as he walked. Either he was steadily becoming more used to the sights his eyes were showing him, or else his brain (perhaps for his own protection) had got the trick of dialling down the amount of information he was assimilating. Whatever the reason, he didn't feel the need to linger with the same obsessiveness, but wandered on his way taking mental snapshots of sights that drew his attention, then pressing on. The conversation with Bethlynn had been more enlightening than he'd expected it to be, and as he walked, taking his snapshots, he turned fragments of it over in his head. Whether or not there was indeed a God-part of Patrick, a part that would never sicken or die, she was plainly quite sincere in that belief, and if the possibility comforted Patrick (while putting food in the cat's bowl) then there was no harm in it. Her assessment of Will, however, was another deal completely. She'd made, it seemed, an instinctual judgment about him, based in part on what she'd heard from Patrick, in part on articles that she'd seen, and in part on the work. He was a man with a dark heart, she'd decided, who wanted to taint others with that darkness. So far, so simple. Whether she was right or wrong, there was nothing there that an intelligent individual with a little imagination might not have construed. But there was more to her theory; more, he suspected, than she'd been willing to share with him. He was an unwitting shaman; that, at least, she'd been ready to tell him. Working change, inducing visions. And why? Because somebody in his past (somebody she didn't even want him to name) had planted a seed.

That could only be Jacob Steep. Whatever else Jacob had done, good and bad, he'd been the first person in Will's life to give him, if only for a few hours, a sense that he was special. Not a poor second best to a dead brother, the lumpen clod to Nathaniel's perfected angel, but a chosen child. How many times in the three decades since that night on the hilltop had he revisited the winter wood, the weapon buzzing in his hand as he strode towards his victims? And seen their blood flow? And heard Jacob, at his back, whispering to him:

Suppose they were the last. The very last.

What had his life to date been but an extended footnote to that encounter: an attempt to make some idiot recompense for the little murders he'd committed at Steep's behest; or rather for the unalloyed joy he'd taken in the thought of shaping the world that way?

If there was some buried desire in him to be more than a witness to extinctions -to be, as Bethlynn had said, a worker of change - then it was because Steep had planted that desire. Whether he had done it intentionally or not was another question entirely. Was it possible that the whole initiation had been stagemanaged to make him into some semblance of the man he'd become? Or had Jacob been about the work of making a child into a murderer, and simply been interrupted in the process, leaving the smeared, unfinished thing Will was to stumble off and puzzle out its purpose for itself? Most likely he would never know. And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers - however loving, however liberal - would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were selfinvented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies which they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.

He almost wished Steep were here, so he could show him the sights. Take him into The Gestalt and buy him a beer.

ii

By the time he got home it was almost six o'clock. There were three messages on the answering machine from Drew, one from Adrianna, and one from Patrick, reporting that he'd just had what he characterized as an intriguing conversation with Bethlynn.

'I couldn't figure out whether she liked you or not, but you certainly made an impression. And she was very insistent about there not being any kind of rift between her and me. So, good job, buddy. I know how hard that was for you to do. But thanks. It means a lot to me.'

Having listened to the messages, he went to sluice off the sweat of his journey and, roughly towelling himself dry, wandered into the bedroom and lay down. Despite his fatigue, he had a sense of simple physical well-being he couldn't remember having for a long time: months, perhaps years, before the events in Balthazar. There was a gentle tremor in his muscles; and in his head an almost reverent calm.

So calm, in fact, that a perverse notion came trotting in to disturb it. 'Where are you, fox?' he said, very quietly.

The empty house made its cooling and settling sounds, as houses do, but there was nothing amid the ticks and creaks that might have indicated Lord Fox's presence. No tapping of his claws on the boards, no swish of his tail against the wall.

'I know you're there somewhere.'

This wasn't a lie. He believed it. The fox had walked the line between dreams and the waking world on two occasions; now Will was ready to join him in that place, and see what the view was like. But first the animal had to show itself.

'Stop being coy,' Will said. 'We're in this together.' He sat up. 'I want to be with you,' he said. 'That sounds sexual, doesn't it? Maybe that's what it is.' He closed his eyes and tried to conjure the animal behind his lids. Its gleaming fur and glittering teeth, its sway and swagger. It was his animal, wasn't it? First his tormentor, then his truth-teller; the eater of dick-flesh and the dropper of bops mots. 'Where the fuck are you?' he wanted to know. Still it didn't come.

Well, he thought, isn't this a perfect little paradox? After rejecting the fox's wisdom for so long, he'd finally come round to understanding its place in his life, and the damn creature wasn't playing.

He got up off the bed, and was about to try his luck in another room when the telephone rang. It was Drew. 'What happened to you?' he wanted to know, 'I've been calling and calling.'

'I went over to Berkeley to kow-tow to Bethlynn. Then I walked back, which was wonderful, and now I'm talking to you, which is even more wonderful.'

'You are up, buddy. Have you been poppin' some pills?'