The incident lingered with her as she wandered home, and she made a mental note to look up the Lundy file when she got into work tomorrow, to see what had brought mother and child to the doctor's that day, and why they'd never returned. When she got back to the house, Morton was in his chair in front of the television, sound asleep, a beer can in his lap, and four more between his feet. She didn't bother to wake him. Instead she went into the kitchen and made herself a ham and cheese sandwich, which she ate leaning on the sink gazing out into the darkened yard. Clouds were coming in to cover the stars, but she didn't suppose it much mattered to the Lundy boy. If he could hear hammerings in Heaven, a few clouds wouldn't dull it much. Sandwich eaten, she retired to bed, hoping that she'd be between the sheets and asleep before Morton roused himself. She needn't have worried. When finally a breath of cool air on her back stirred her from slumber and she felt him slide into bed beside her, the luminous face of the clock read ten past three. Grunting to himself, he pulled the sheets in his direction, rolled over and instantly began to snore.

It took her a little time to get back to sleep, and when she did it was fitful. In the morning, sitting alone at the kitchen table (Morton had already gone to work when she woke), she tried to sort through the dream fragments circling in her head and remembered that in one Joe had been introducing her to the people in the photograph he'd shown her. All five of them had been in a car for some reason, and Joe's brother kept saying: Where are we? Hell and damn, where are we? It wasn't the most reassuring of dreams. What was she thinking? That they were all lost together now? She took three aspirin with a cup of black coffee and headed out to work, putting the dream out of her mind. Which was a pity. Had she dwelt on it a little longer, she might have puzzled FOUR

The woman on the motorcycle looked like a seasoned traveler: her leathers dusty and beaten-up, her hair, when she eased off her helmet, cropped short and bleached by desert sun; her face, which had probably never been pretty, worn and raw. She had a bruise on her jaw, and lines deeply etched around her eyes and mouth; none of them laugh lines.

Her name was Tesla Bombeck, and today she was coming home. Not back to her literal birthplace (that was Philadelphia) nor even to the city where she'd been raised (which was Detroit) but to the town where the reconfiguring that had made her the raw, bruised, etched wanderer she was had begun.

Or rather, to the remains of that town. At the height of its mediocrity, this place-Palomo Grove-had been a nominee for the perfect California haven. Unlike Everville, which had grown organically over a century and a half, the Grove had sprung into being in three years, created by planners and real-estate magnates with sheaves of demographics for inspiration. And it had quietly prospered for a time, hidden in the folds of the Simi Valley a couple of miles from the highway that speeded its wage eamers to lose Angeles every morning and speeded them home again every night.

The u4fic on that highway was busier than ever now, but the off-ramp that served the Grove was seldom used. Occasionally a tourist who wanted to add the Town That Died Overnight to his list of Californian curiosities would come to look at the desolation, but such visits were increasingly rare.

Nor was any attempt being made to rebuild the Grove, despite vast losses sustained by both landowners and individuals. Tesla wasn't surprised. These were recessionary times; people no longer believed in real estate as a solid investment, much less real estate that had proven unstable in the past.

For Palomo Grove hadn't simply died, it had buried itself, its streets gaping like graves for its fine houses. Many of those streets were still barricaded off to keep the sightseers from coming to harm, but Tesla had been hearing yes when she was told no from childhood, and it was up over the barricades she first went, to wander where the damage was worst.

She had thought about coming back here many times in her five-year journey through what she liked to call the Americas, by which she meant the mainland states. they were not, she had many times insisted to Grillo, one country; not remotely. Just because they served the same Coke in Louisiana as they served in Idaho, and the same sitcoms were playing in New Mexico as were playing in Massachusetts, didn't mean there was such a thing as America. When presidents and pundits spoke of the voice and will of the American people, she rolled her eyes. That was a fiction; she'd been told so plainly by a yellow dog that had followed her around Arizona for a week and a half during her hallucination period, turning up in diners and motel rooms to chat with her in such a friendly fashion she'd missed him when he disappeared.

If she remembered rightly (and she'd never know) it was the dog that had first mentioned going back to the Grove.

"You gotta bury your nose in your own shit sooner or later," he'd advised, leaning back in a threadbare armchair. "It's the only way to get in touch."

"With what?" she'd wanted to know.

"With what? With what?" he'd said, coming to perch at the bottom of the bed. "I'm not your analyst! Find out for yourself."

"Suppose there's nothing to find out?" she'd countered.

"Don't talk crap," he'd said. "You're not afraid of finding there's nothing to find. You're afraid of finding so much it'll drive you crazy." He wandered down the bed and straddled her, so they were nose to nose. "Well guess what, Miss Bombeck? You're already crazy. So what's to loset'

She couldn't remember if she'd worked up some pithy y to this or simply passed out. Probably the latter. She'd sed out in a lot of motel rooms during that phase. Anyway, the yellow dog had sown the seed. And the months had passed, and she'd gradually regained a semblance of sanity, and on and off, when she was consulting a map or looking at a sign-post, she'd think: maybe I should do it today. Maybe I should go back to the Grove.

But whenever she'd come close to doing so, another voice had spoken up; the voice of the personality who had shared her skull with her for the past half-decade.

His name was Raul, and he'd been born an ape. He'd not stayed that way for long, however. At the age of four he'd been evolved from his simian state to manhood, the agent of that miracle fluid which its discoverer had dubbed the Nuncio, the messenger. The fluid was not the fruit of pure science, but of a mingling of disciplines-part biogenetics, part alchemy-and it had gone on to touch and transform others, including

(briefly) Tesia, coaxing forth the natural propensities of those it influenced, and creating in the process the two warring forces who had made Palomo Grove their battleground.

One was the Nuncio's maker, a mescaline-addicted visionary by the name of Fletcher, who had become a force for transcendence under the messenger's tutelage. The other was his patron, Randolph Jaffe, who had funded the discovery in the hope of attaining access to a condition of flesh and spirit that was tantamount to divinity. The Nuncio had done nothing to dull that ambition, but it had shaped from the Jaff a creature so consumed by his dreams of power that his spirit had atrophied. By the time he'd won the war with Fletcher (destroying the Grove in the process), and was ready to claim his prize, his psyche was too frail to bear the triumph. He had forfeited his reason in pursuit of godhood. Soon after, he'd forfeited his life. It was little wonder then, that Raul had protested so vigorously her desire to return to the Grove.

I hate California, he'd told her any number of times. If we never go back there it'll be too soon She hadn't fought with him over it. Though she had full control of her body, and could have driven West without his being able to do a thing to stop her, his presence had been comforting during the many terrible times that followed the demise of Palomo Grove, and given that she fully expected such times to come again, more terrible than ever. she wanted to keep relations sweet, The paradox of this, that her dubious sanity was preserved by one of the things that drove people crazy (voices in the head) was not lost on hei-. Nor did she forget that her tenant, who was usually scrupulous in respecting the boundaries between his thoughts and hers, suffered from crise,, of hi," own, at which times she became the comforter. She would wake sometimes to hear him sobbing in her head, bemoaning the fact that he had given up his body in the war, and would never again have an anatomy to call his own. She would soothe him then as best she could; tell him they would find some way to free him one of these days, and until then wasn't it better this way, because at least they had each other?