But today the parade did not arouse him. He went from film to film like an addict among pillaged peddlers, looking for a fix no one could supply, until the videos were piled high around his television. Two-ways, three-ways, oral, anal, golden showers, bondage, discipline, lesbian scenes, dildo scenes, rape and romance scenes—he went through them all but none provided the release he needed. His search became a kind of pursuit of himself. What will rouse me will be me, was his half-finished thought.

It was a desperate situation. This was the first time in his life—excluding events with the League—that voyeurism had failed to excite. The first time he wanted the performers sharing his reality as he shared theirs. He'd always been happy to turn them off when he'd shot his wad; even been faintly contemptuous of their charms once their hold on him had been mopped up. Now he mourned them, like lovers he'd lost without ever knowing them properly, whose every orifice he'd sight of, but whose intimacy was denied him.

Yet, some time after dawn, his spirits as low as he'd known them, the strangest thought occurred: that perhaps he could bring them to him; by the sheer heat of his desire foment them into being. Dreams could be made real. Artists did it all the time, and didn't everyone have a little art in them? It was that thought, barely formed, that kept him watching the screen, through The Last Lays of Pompeii and Bom to Be Made and Secrets of a Women's Prison; films he knew as well as his own history, but which, unlike his history, might yet live in the present tense.

He was not the only Grover visited by such thoughts, though none were as fixated on the erotic as William. The same idea—that some precious, essential person, or persons, might be called up from the mind and made a boon companion— occurred to every member of the crowd that had gathered in the Mall the evening before. Soap-opera stars, game-show hosts, dead or lost relations, divorced spouses, missing children, comic-book characters: there were as many names as there were minds to summon them.

For some, like William Witt, the face of their desire gathered momentum at such speed (fuelled in several cases by obsession, in others by longing or envy) that by dawn the following day there were already clots in corners of their rooms where the air had thickened in preparation for the miracle.

In the bedroom of Shuna Melkin, who was the daughter of Christine and Larry Melkin, a fabled rock princess—dead of an overdose several years past but Shuna Melkin's sole and obsessive idol, was making herself known with croonings so subtle it could have passed for the breeze in the eaves but that Shuna knew the tune.

In Ossie Larton's loft there were scratchings he knew with an inward smile were the birth pangs of the werewolf he'd kept secret company with since he'd first known that such creatures were imaginable. His name was Eugene, this werewolf, which—at the tender age of six, when Ossie had first created his companion—had seemed an appropriate name for a man who grew fur under the full moon.

For Karen Conroy the three leads of her favorite movie, Love Knows Your Name, a little-seen romance she'd wept through six days running during a long-past trip to Paris, could be sensed as a delicate European perfume in the lounge.

And so on, and so forth.

By noon that day there wasn't any one of the crowd who hadn't had an intimation—many of which were dismissed or ignored of course—that they had unexpected visitors. The population of Palomo Grove, which had swelled by a hundred horrors at the Jaff's summons, was about to swell again.

"You've already admitted you don't really understand what happened last night—"

"It's not a question of admitting anything, Grillo."

"OK. Let's not get mad at each other. Why do we always end up shouting?"

"We're not shouting."

"OK. We're not shouting. All I'm saying is, please consider the possibility that this errand he's sending you on—"

"Errand?"

"Now you're shouting. I'm just saying, think a minute. This could be the last trip you ever make."

"Possibility accepted."

"So let me come with you. You've never been south of Tijuana."

"Neither have you."

"It's rough—"

"Listen, I've pitched art movies to men perplexed by Dumbo. I know rough. If you want to do something really useful, stay here and get well."

"I'm well already. I never felt better."

"I need you here, Grillo. Watching. It's not over, by a long way."

"What am I supposed to be watching for?" Grillo asked, conceding the argument by no longer pursuing it.

"You've always had an eye for the hidden agenda. When the Jaff makes his move, however quietly, you'll know it. By the way, did you see Ellen last night? She was in the crowd, with her kid. You might start by seeing how she feels the morning after..."

It wasn't that Grillo's fears for her safety weren't legitimate, nor indeed that she wouldn't have taken pleasure in his company on the journey ahead. But for reasons she could find no gentle way of stating, and so didn't state at all, his presence would be an intrusion she had no right to risk, either for his good or for the good of the task ahead. It had been one of Fletcher's last acts to choose her to go to the Mission; he'd even indicated that it had somehow been preordained. Not so long ago she'd have dismissed such mysticism; but after last night she was obliged to be more open-minded. The world of mysteries she'd made light of in her spook and spaceship screenplays was not to be so easily mocked. It had come looking for her, found her, and pitched her—cynicism and all— among its heavens and its hells. The latter in the shape of the Jaff's army, the former's presence in Fletcher's transformation: flesh to light.

Charged with being the dead man's agent on earth she felt a curious relaxation, despite the jeopardy that lay ahead. She no longer had to keep her cynicism polished; no longer had to divide her imaginings from moment to moment into the real (solid, sensible) and the fanciful (vaporous, valueless). If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.

Mid-morning she left the Grove, choosing a route that took her out of the town past the Mall, where the status quo was well on its way to being restored. With speed she'd be over the border by nightfall; and at the Mision de Santa Catrina, or—if Fletcher's hope was well founded—on the empty ground where it had stood, before dawn.

On his father's instructions Tommy-Ray had crept back to the Mall the previous night, long after the crowd had dispersed. The police had arrived by that point but he had no difficulty in achieving his purpose, which was the retrieval of the terata which he had attached with his own hands to Katz's flesh. The Jaff had other reasons for wanting the creature back than keeping it from being found by the police. It was not dead, and once returned to the hands of its creator it regurgitated all it had seen and heard, the Jaff laying his hands on the beast like a faith-healer and drawing the report from the terata's system.

When he'd heard what he needed to hear, he killed the messenger.

"Well now..." he said to Tommy-Ray, "...it seems you'll have the journey I told you about sooner than I planned."

"What about Jo-Beth? That bastard Katz has got her."

"We wasted effort last night trying to persuade her to join our family. She rejected us. We'll waste no more time. Let her take her chance in the maelstrom."

"But..."

"No more on this," the Jaff said. "Your obsession with her really is ludicrous. And don't sulk! You've been indulged for too long. You think that smile of yours can get you whatever you want. Well it won't get you her."