"I'll go, lover," Ryan whispered. "Next door. You want any help, just bang once on the wall and I'll be in here."

"Sure. Could take some time."

The freezie's words danced over and around them, plaited with an old, sad madness.

"The box closing. Eyes shut but still seeing. The softness of the silken shroud embracing the cold skin. The lid lowering. A loose thread of cotton trailing against the corner of your mouth. Tickling you, for all eternity. A spider, buried with you, seeking somewhere to spin its web and lay its eggs." A shudder racked the man's body. "In your ear, burrowing inward. Gestation. Birth. A thousand tiny spiders, eating inward. Into your living brain. Living and feeling but paralyzed and helpless."

The door shut behind Ryan, and Krysty sat on the bed, reaching to hold Rick's palsied left hand in both of hers. "Be all right," she said. "Quiet and easy, brother. You got so much pain inside you, Rick. Gotta let it out of you."

"Locked in the box. One time around then they put the lid down on you. John said that. John Stewart. Said that. He didn't know what it was like. My body trapped me. Locking and tensing and falling and the tiredness. Bells of hell, the tiredness. I wanted to rest and get away. That's why I agreed to let them do it to me. Knew it wouldn't work. Didn't care. The gateways being used for war. Instant soldiers here and there. Oh, fuck! I hated that. Lock the lid down on the box. Goodbye to pain forever. Then they woke me up. Woke me healed and new. Not now. Not ever. Nevermore. Nevermore."

Krysty systematically began to clear her mind, using the techniques that her mother had taught her, long ago in the ville of Harmony.

When Krysty was under great stress she was able to harness the Earth power, giving herself a cataclysmic strength for a few moments. But using it drained her for hours after. This was different — the healing way had nothing to do with dissolution.

She focused on a sky of untouched blue, a river foaming over silver rocks, imagining the water washing away all pain and anguish. She gripped Rick's hand more tightly.

"I hear the slamming of the lid. My heart beating, louder. How can they not hear it? My nails break against the implacable dark wood. Blood warm down over my palms, my wrists. Muscles straining, helplessly and utterly without hope. Oh, the tigers that come in the dead of night! Help me, help me. The sibyl said she wished only to die."

Ginsberg was talking more and more slowly. Krysty was weeping, not aware of her own grief, tuning in to his bone-cold sorrow, trying to tap it and divert it. She looked for sparks of light within the bleak world that might illuminate and carry hope.

"Come out of it, Richard," she said, lips barely moving.

"Trapped in my crippled body in a twisted, demented time," he moaned, fingers tightening on her hand.

"No." She drew on some lines that her mother had made her learn. "There is a wind on the heath, my brother. Life is very sweet. Who would wish to die?"

"Everyone I loved is dust," he said quietly, the words hardly disturbing the warm air in the small room.

"We all will be, Rick. One day. You and me and Ryan and everyone. Today's baby is tomorrow's dust. Live while you can, Rick. Live and live and live."

His eyes had been staring at the roughly plastered ceiling. As Krysty looked at the freezie, his face grew calmer. His gaze dropped, settling on her face. His breathing steadied, and there was something like the frail ghost of a normal, sane smile.

"Krysty Wroth, I believe?"

"Richard Neal Ginsberg, isn't it?"

"Guess it is."

"Good to have you back," she said, feeling the strain of drawing the demons from the helpless man's soul.

"Didn't much care for the places I've been. Too damned dark."

"It's dark out, Rick."

"Light in here. Light and warm, Krysty. I feel real tired."

"Yeah. Me too."

Ryan had been sitting with the others, relaxing, half-asleep.

After an hour had slipped by he sighed and stood, stretching, feeling the muscles around his ribs tightening as he moved. "Just going to take a look," he said.

As he stepped into the corridor he nearly jumped out of his skin. His fist clenched and he began a lethal, crushing blow to the bridge of the nose, checking his punch in time, inches short of the sharp, quill-like nose of Ruby Rainer.

"Shedskin!" she exclaimed, stumbling back, hands waving at the air. "You were going to hit me, Mr. Cawdor!"

"No, ma'am," he replied. "If I'd been going to hit you, then I'd have done it. Not a good idea to creep up on a person like that, Mrs. Rainer. Could lead to a nasty accident."

She recovered a little, brushing at her print apron, running a finger along the top of the bannister rail, checking it for dust. "That girl, Rosemary! She never cleans up... But that wasn't what I came up to see about."

"And what was that?"

"Is Mr. Ginsberg recovered? I hope he'll be at the seven o'clock service on the morrow. It would be sucha disappointment if he missed it."

"Just going to check. I hope we'll all be there."

He watched her go slowly down the stairs before he eased open the door and peeked in. Rick Ginsberg lay fast asleep on his bed, breathing peacefully. Krysty slept at his side, holding his hand.

Ryan smiled and very quietly closed the bedroom door.

Chapter Nineteen

"Blessed is the worm!"

"And blessed are the scales thereof!"

"Blessed be the fang!"

"And the hollow needle!"

"Blessed is the crushing and the coil!"

"And blessed are the rattle and the skin of the great worms!"

"The Lord loves the worms of the earth and all that crawl and sting."

"As we do also love them!"

"The poison shall harm only the ungodly and the righteous sacrifice!"

"And the innocent shall walk untouched through all the lands of Canaan."

"As it was in the beginning, before sky-dark and long winter, is now and ever shall be. Our world, never ending. Amen!"

"Amen," came the echoing chorus from the huge congregation that brimmed along every bench and pew in the Temple of Snakefish, formerly the Rex Cinema and Video Palace.

One of the twin guardians, Norman Mote, had just finished the introductory call-and-response part of the a.m. service. Marianne sat at his side, with their son Joshua, the apostolic apprentice, next to his mother.

At a rough count, Ryan reckoned that virtually all the adult population of the trim little ville was there, crammed together, cheek by jowl.

It was swelteringly, sweatingly hot inside the building.

Ruby Rainer had shouted up the stairs, a few minutes after six, asking if they wanted some fresh-baked cornbread with eggs and grits before coming along to the service. They had all accepted, though Rick made heavy weather of the meal.

The freezie was looking better, like someone who had been through the fire and come out the other side purged and cleansed by the experience.

He'd walked with the others along the bustling main street to the church, helped by an old bamboo cane with a curved handle, which had been a gift from their landlady. "It was my late husband's," she'd said. "He got it from his uncle, who found it in a ruined shack up beyond the north-forty well. You're welcome to take it, Mr. Ginsberg."

Ryan had rarely seen so many people gathered together in one place.

Baron Edgar Brennan sat in the front pew, on the right with his brother Rufus. An enormously fat young man sat next along. Ryan figured he must be the nephew, Layton, pilot of the air wag. He was dressed in a suit of dark blue leather and was so large that it looked as though the bench seat might tip up if anyone else stood. The last of the worshipers in that privileged pew was Carla Petersen, who had changed her riding breeches for a pleated skirt, but was otherwise wearing the same clothes as when they'd met her in the town hall. She had turned around as Ryan led his group in, favoring them with a smile. A smile that seemed, to Ryan, to be directed rather more at J.B. than at the rest of them.