His appetite for information had not deserted him, however, even in these grim circumstances. He researched the nature of his devourer meticulously, not out of any hope that he would defeat it, but simply to know what was going on inside his body. The coverings of his nerve fibers were being stripped, it seemed, in his brain and in his spine. Though many fine minds were working to discover why, there were no definitive answers. His disease was a mystery as profound as anything in the Reef, and a good deal more palpable. Sometimes, while he was sitting in front of the monitors watching messages come in, he imagined he could feel the beast Sclerosis moving through his body, unmaking him cell by cell, nerve by nerve, and the words appearing on the screens, tales of sightings and visitations, began to seem like just another manifestation of disease. The healthy psyche had no need of such fantasies. It lived in the world of the possible, and was content.

Sometimes, in a fury of despair, he would switch off the screen and toy with the notion of unplugging the whole system; leaving the tale-tellers to babble on in silence and darkness. But he would always return to his chair after a time, addict that he was, guiltily turn the screens back on to study whatever bizarrities the Reef had accrued in his absence. In early spring, the beast Sclerosis had suddenly become ambitious; within the space of a month he felt twenty years of frailties overtake him. He was prescribed heavier medications, which he diligently took, and the doctor offered advice about planning for disability, which he just as diligently ignored. He would never go into a wheelchair; that much he'd decided. He'd take an overdose one night, and slip away; it would be easier that way. He had no wife to hold on for; no children to watch grow just another day. He had only the screens, and the tales they told; and they would gd until the end of the world, with or without him.

And then, in early June, a strange thing: There was a sudden escalation in the number of reports, the systems besieged every hour of the day and night with people wanting to share their secrets. There was no coherent pattern in this onslaught, but the sheer scale of it made him wonder if the madness was not reaching critical mass.

Around that time Tesia had checked in from New Mexico, and he'd told her what was going on. She'd been in one of her fatalistic moods (too much peyote, he suspected) and not much interested. When he'd called Harry D'Amour in New York, however, the response had been entirely different. D'Amour, the sometime detective whose cases had invariably turned into metaphysical excursions, was eager for information. they had spoken at least twice daily over a three-week period, with D'Amour demanding chapter and verse of any report that smacked of the Satanic, particularly if it originated in New York. Grillo found D'Amour's faith in the vocabulary of Catholicism absurd, but he played along. And yes, there were a number of reports that fitted the description. Two mutilation-murders in the Bronx, involving nails through the hands and feet, and a triple suicide at a convent in Brooklyn (all of which D'Amour had already investigated); then a host of other more minor oddities which he was not aware of, some of which clearly supported some thesis or other. D'Amour had declined to be explicit, even on a safe line, as to the precise nature of that thesis, until their last conversation. Then he'd solemnly told Grillo he had good reason to believe that the return of the Anti-Christ was being plotted in New York City. Grillo had not been entirely able to disguise how laughable he thought the notion.

"Oh you don't like the wordy, is that it?" D'Amour had replied. "We'll find something different, if you prefer. Call it the lad. Call it the Enemy. It's all the Devil by another name." they hadn't spoken after that, though Grillo had several times attempted to make further contact. There were new reports from the five boroughs almost every day, it seemed, many of them involving acts of sickening brutality. Several times Grillo had wondered if perhaps one of the bodies found rotting on the city's wastelands that summer was not that of Harry D'Amour. And wondered too what name he might call the Devil if it came looking for D'Amour's informer, here in Omaha.

Sclerosis, perhaps.

And then there'd come this recent call from Tesla, asking about sightings of Fletcher, and he'd finished the exchange with such an emptiness inside him, he was almost ready to take the overdose there and then. Why could he not bear the notion of her coming to see him?

Because he looked too much like his father now; legs like sticks, hair gray and brittle? Because he was afraid she'd turn away, unable to see him like this? She'd never do that. Even in her crazy times (and she'd had more than her share) she never lost her grip on the feelings between them.

No, what he feared was regret. What he feared was her seeing him in decline, and saying: Why didn't we do better with what we feel for each other? Why didn't we enjoy what was in our hearts, instead of hiding it away? What he feared was being told it was too late, even though he already knew it.

Once again, the Reef had saved him from utter despair. After her call he'd brooded for a while-thinking of the pills, thinking of his stupidities-and then, too weary to think any more but too stirred up to sleep, he'd gone back to his place in front of the monitors, to see if he could find any convincing reports of the Fletcher's presence.

It was not Fletcher he found, however. Sifting through the reports logged in the last couple of weeks, he came across a tale that had previously gone unread. It came from a regular and, he thought, reliable source: a woman in Illinois who printed up crime-scene photographs for a local county sheriff's department. She had a horrible account to make. A young couple had been attacked in late July, the female victim, who was seven months pregnant, killed outright and then opened up by the attacker, who had taken his leisurely time to examine her in front of her wounded lover," then removed the fetus and absconded with it. The father had died a day later, but not before he passed a strange description along to the police, which had been kept out of the newspapers because of its bizarrity, but which Grillo's informer felt needed relating. The killer had not been alone, the dying man had said. He'd been surrounded by a cloud of dust "full of screams and faces."

"I begged him," he'd gone on to say, "begged him not to mess up Louise, but he kept saying he had to, he had to. He was the Death-Boy, he said, and that's what Death-Boys did."

That, in essence, had been the report. Having read it Grillo sat for half an hour in front of the screen, as confounded as he was intrigued. What was happening out there in the real world? Fletcher had died in the mall at Palomo Grove. Cremated; gone to flame and spirit. Tommy-Ray McGuire, the son of the Jaff, the Death-Boy, had died a few days later, at a spot in New Mexico called Trinity. He too had been cremated, but in a more terrible fire than had consumed Fletcher.

they were both dead, their parts in the tangled tale of humanity and the dream-sea over. Or so everyone had supposed.

was it possible everyone had been wrong? That somehow they'd defied oblivion and each returned to pick up the threads of their ambition? If so, there was only one explanation as to how. Both had been touched by the Nuncio during their lives. Perhaps evolution's message was more extraordinary than anyone had guessed, and it had put them beyond the reach of death.

He shuddered, daring to think that. Beyond the reach of death. Now there was a promise worth living for.

He called California. A bleary Tesia answered the phone.

"Tes, it's me."