An idea formed...put the body in the back of the ambulance...send them both over the edge of the cliffs into the wild, pounding surf far below...

And as the plan took shape...

The storm stopped.

The thunder faded, the wind died, the rain ebbed to a drizzle.  Suddenly only swirling fog danced beyond the windows.

“Senador?” Emilio said.  He rested his hands against the now still glass and stared out at the featureless gray.  “It is over?”

“Not yet,” the Senador said, his voice hushed.  “I’ve read about this type of thing.  I believe this is what they call the eye of the storm, the calm at its center.  It won’t last long.  But why don’t you hurry up topside and take a look around, see how much damage we’ve got up there.  Don’t get too far from the door.  As soon as the wind starts to blow again, get back inside, because the back end is going to be just as bad as the front, maybe worse.”

Emilio nodded.  “Of course.”

He hurried up the stairs and stepped outside into a dead calm.

The still, warm air hung heavy with moisture.  Fog drifted lazily around him, insinuating through his clothes, clinging to his skin.  So strange to have no wind.  Emilio could not remember a time when a breeze wasn’t blowing across the cliff tops.

And silent...so eerily silent.   Like cotton wadding, the fog muffled everything, even the sound of the surf below.  No birds, no insects, no rustling grass...silence.

No, wait.  Emilio’s ears picked up a hum, somewhere down the driveway, growing louder.  It sounded almost like...

A car.

Emilio gasped and took a hesitant step toward the noise.  He glanced at the carport.  The Senador’s limousine and the ambulance were where he’d left them.  And still the sound grew louder.

No!  This is not possible!

Instinctively he reached for his pistol before he remembered that he’d left it downstairs in the great room when he went into town.  He hadn’t retrieved it because what need for a pistol with the bridge out and Paraiso isolated from the outside world?

The bridge was out!  He’d seen it fall.  He’d almost gone down with it.  How could—?

Emilio stood frozen as a Ford sedan rounded the final curve in the rain-soaked, debris-littered approach road and pulled to a stop not a hundred feet in front of him.  Normally Emilio would have rushed forward to confront any trespassers, but this was different.  Something was wrong about this car.

A short, bearded man stepped out of the passenger side and glanced around before staring at Emilio.

“The Mother,” he said in an unfamiliar accent.  “She is here.  She has to be here.  Where is the Mother?”

The Mother? Emilio wondered.  What is he—?  He was jolted by a sudden thought: Can he be talking about the ancient body below in the house?

But Emilio had questions of his own.

“How did you get here?”

“In the car,” the man said with ill-concealed impatience.  “We drove up the road.”

“But the bridge—!”

“Yes, we came over the bridge.”

“The bridge is out!  Down!”

The bearded man looked at him as if he were crazy.  “The bridge is intact.  We just drove over it.”

No!  This couldn’t be!  This—

The driver door opened then and out stepped a familiar figure.  Emilio steeled himself not to react, to hide the sudden mad thumping of his heart against the inner walls of his chest.

The priest!  Father Daniel Fitzpatrick!

The priest looked Emilio square in the face but gave no sign of recognition.  Without the hat, the mirrored glasses, and the phony beard he’d worn that night in the church, Emilio was a different person.

But if he hadn’t come looking for Emilio, if he hadn’t brought the police to arrest him for the murder of the nun, why was he here?

“Where are we?” the priest asked.

Emilio was about to answer, to tell them both to get back into their car and get off the Senador’s private property, when the rear door opened and out stepped a dead woman.  He knew she was dead because he’d killed her himself.

“You,” she said softly, staring at him levelly.  “I know you.  You murdered me.  Why?  You didn’t have to kill me.  Why did you do that?”

Something snapped within Emilio.  He could stand no more.  He turned and fled back inside, slamming the door behind him.  As he turned the deadbolt, he leaned against the door, panting and sweating.

This was loco!  A car carrying a walking, talking dead woman drives across a bridge that is no longer there.  He was going loco.

He turned and shut off the power to the elevator.

Good.  If they were real, they now were locked outside and would be at the mercy of the second half of the storm.  If they were not real, what did it matter?

Emilio pulled himself together, took a deep breath, and descended to the great room.

“All is well topside, Senador.”

But the Senador did not seem to hear.  He stood by Charlie’s bed, staring out through the windows, a mix of awe and terror distorting his features.

Emilio followed his gaze and cringed against the stairway when he saw what was taking shape out over the Pacific and racing toward them.

“Madre!”

‡

Everything had happened so fast.

You murdered me.

Dan had been momentarily stunned by Carrie’s words.  His mind whirled, adding a beard, hat, and glasses to the mustachioed face staring at Carrie in horrified disbelief, comparing this voice to the one he’d heard in the church, and then he was sure: Here was the motherless scum who had put a bullet in her heart.

Before he’d been able to react, the man had turned and dashed back to the hemi-dome behind him and vanished through a doorway.  And then a Navy reconnaissance plane had swooshed overhead.  He’d just started wondering what sort of idiot would be flying in this hellish storm when another sound captured his attention.

A dull roaring filled Dan’s ears.  At first he assumed it was enraged blood shooting through his battered brain, then he glanced beyond the hemi-dome and saw something impossibly tall, incalculably huge looming out of the foggy distance and hurtling toward them.

“Oh, my God!”

Nearly half a mile wide and God knew how tall, it stretched—swirling, twisting, writhing—from the dim, misty heights to the sea where it terminated in an eruption of foam on the wave-wracked surface of the Pacific.  Water...an angry towering column of spinning water...all water...yet bright lights flashed within it.

To call this thing a waterspout was to call Mount Rushmore a piece of sculpture.  And it was coming here, zeroed in on this spot.

Dan spun around, looking for a place to hide, but saw none.  The car—no...too vulnerable.  The door in the hemi-dome—it had to lead below, to safety.

Pulling Carrie with him, he ran to it and tugged on the handle.  The handle wouldn’t turn, the door wouldn’t budge.  Kesev stood back, strangely detached as he watched death’s irresistible approach.

“Locked!” Dan shouted, and began pounding and kicking at the unyielding surface.  “Let us in, damn you!  Open up!”

And all around him the roaring of the approaching waterspout grew to a deafening crescendo.

This is it, he thought.  We’re going to die right here.  In a few minutes it’ll all be over.  But God, I’m not ready to go yet!

And then Carrie laid a hand on his shoulder, reached past him and turned the knob.

The door swung open.

Dan swallowed his shock—no time to wonder how the door had become unlocked—and propelled Carrie through ahead of him.  Kesev followed at a more leisurely pace, closing the door behind him.

Stairs ahead, leading downward toward light.  Dan went to squeeze past Carrie but she’d already begun her descent.  He followed her down the curved stairway into a huge, luxuriously furnished room.  His hope of surviving this storm rose as he saw that it was carved out of the living rock of the cliff itself, and then that hope was dashed when he saw the huge glass front overhanging the ocean.  The monstrous waterspout was out there, still headed directly for them, and no glass on earth would stop that thing.