"Something's happening on the shore," Coker said to Erwin. "We should stay away," the lawyer counseled, casting i fearful look up at the crosses. "This is worse than I thought."

"Yes it is,,' Coker said. "But that doesn't mean wt, should be cowards!"

He hurried on, past the crosses and the tethered D'Amour, up the slope, which was rolling in mounting waves. Reluctantly, Erwin followed, more out of a fear that he would lose his one companion in this insanity than from any genuine urge to know what lay ahead. He wished-ah, how he wished-for the life he'd led before he'd found McPherson's confession. For pettiness, for triviality; for all the little things that had vexed him. Digging through hi,; fridge for something that smelled bad; finding a stain on hi,, favorite tie; standing in front of the mirror wishing he hat] more hair and less belly. Perhaps it had been a bland life. puttering on without purpose or direction, but he'd liked its banality, now that he was denied it. Better that than the crosses, and the door, and the whatever was coming through it.

"Do you see?" said Coker, once Erwin had caught up with him.

He saw. How could he not? The door, stretching up through the mist as if eager to pierce the stars. The shore on the far side of it, every rock and pebble upon it rising in a solid wave. And worst of all, the swarming wall of energies approaching across that shore "Is that it?" he said to Coker. He'd expected a more pal-, pable manifestation of the hann it brought. A devourer's tools, a torturer's smm, a lunatic's frenzy: something to advertise its evil. But instead, here was a thing he could have discovered by closing his eyes. The busy darkness behind his lids.

Coker yelled something over his shoulder by way of reply, but it was lost in the tumult. The shore beyond the threshold was convulsing, as though it were a body in the throes of a grand mal, each spasm throwing boulders the size of houses up into the air; and up, and up again, the scale of the seizure increasing exponentially as Erwin watched. Coker, meanwhile, strode on, the ground around him growing increasingly insolid, stones, dirt and plant life melted into filthy stew. It had mounted up to his waist now, and it seemed even his phantom body was subject to its currents, because he was twice thrown off his feet and washed back in Erwin's direction.

He wasn't daring the tide simply to get a better view of the quaking shore. There were two other figures in the grip of this liquid earth-an old woman hanging on to the back of a man who looked to be in the last moments of life-and Coker was struggling to reach them. Blood ran from a grievous wound on the side of the man's head, where something-perhaps a rock-had sheared off his car and opened his scalp to his skull. Why Coker was so interested to study these unfortunates was beyond Erwin, but he strode into the melted dirt himself to find out.

This time he heard what Coker was hollering.

"Oh Mary, mother of God, look at her. Look!"

"What is it?" Erwin yelled back.

"That's Maeve, Toothaker! That's my wife!"

The escalating turmoil had not dissuaded Bartho from his task. The more the ground swayed and shook the more attentive to his duties he became, as though his redemption lay in finishing the business of crucifying D'Amour.

He was bending to the task of untethering Harry to bring him to the cross when one of Blessedm'n Zury's acolytes-a creature with a round, piebald face, and the bow-legged gait of a midget-rolled into view and picked up Bartho's hammer. The crucifer instructed him to put it down, but instead the acolyte rushed at him and struck him in the face, the blow so fast and fierce the bigger man was felled. Before he could get up again the acolyte struck him a second and third time. Pale fluid sprayed from Bartho's cracked skull, and he let out a rhythmical whoop.

If it was a call for help, it went unanswered, or perhaps unheard, given the din that was shaking earth and air. With his whoop failing him Bartho started to rise, but the hammer was there to meet him, and this time cracked his face from chin to brow. He sank down, the blood gushing from him, and lay twitching under the empty cross.

Harry had meanwhile been working at his knotted wrists with his teeth, but before he could free himself the acolyte tossed the bloodied hammer away, pulled a knife from Bartho's belt and waddled over to free the prisoner.

"Doesn't take much, does it?" the man said to Harry, his voice a nasal whine. "One rope and you're reduced to an animal." He worked at the knot with the blade, his back to the crack. "What's going on over there?" he wanted to know.

"I can't make out." The rope was cut, and fell away. "Thank you," D'Amour said. "I don't know why-"

"It's me, Harry. It's Raul." "Raul?"

The round face beamed. "I finally got a body of my own," he said.

"Well, not quite. There's something else in here with me, but it's virtually cretinous."

"What happened to Tesla?"

"I was separated from her, at the threshold. The power there, it's overwhelming. It pulled me out of her head."

"And where is she now?"

"She went to look for Grillo, I think," Raul said. "I'm going to go look for her, before it's all over. I want to make my farewells. What about you?"

Harry's gaze went back to the maelstrom around the door. "When the lad comes-" Raul said.

"I know. It'll take hold of my head and fill it with shit." There were already signs of the lad's proximity in the air. Harry's eyes were stinging, his head whining, his teeth aching. "Is it the Devil, Raul?"

"If you want it to be," Raul replied.

Harry nodded. It was as good an answer as any.

"You're not coming then?" Raul said.

"No," Harry replied. "I came up here to see what the Enemy looks like and that's what I'm going to do."

"Men I'll wish you lucV,,, Raul said, as another wave of shudders Passed through the ground. "I'm out of here, D'Amour!" With that, he turned and stumbled away between the crosses, leaving Harry to continue his interrupted ascent. There were fissures gaping in the ground around him, the widest of them a yard across, and growing. A viscous mess of liquefied earth was rolling down from the area around the crevices, and running off into them.

And beyond it, the neirica itself, which was now fully thirty yards wide, offering Harry a substantial view of the shore. It was no longer the seductive place he'd glimpsed from the chambers of the Zyem Carasophia. The lad's titanic form blocked out the dream-sea, and the shore itself was a rising hail of rock and dirt. It didn't block the lad's influence upon his mind, however. He felt a wave of intense selfrevulsion taint his thoughts. It was a sickness in him, the taint told him, wanting to see this abomination face to face: a disease from which he would deservedly die, He tried to shake the poison from his head, but it wouldn't go. He stumbled on with images of death filling his mind's eye: Ted Dusseldorf's body on a gurney, covered by a sheet; the mangled flesh of the Zyem Carasophia, sprawled around their chamber; Maria Nazareno's corpse, slumped in front of a candle flame. He heard them sobbing all around him, the dead, demanding explanation.

"You never did understand." He looked off to his right, and there, wedged in a fissure, his arms trapped at his sides, was Father Hess. He was wearing the wound Lazy Susan had given him all those years ago, and they were as fresh as if he'd just received them.

"I'm not here to accuse you, Harry," he said. "You're not here, period," Harry said.

"Oh come on, Harry," Hess said, "since when did that matter?" He grinned. "It's not reality that causes the trouble, Harry. It's illusions. You should have learned that by now."

That was all this was, Harry knew: an illusion. He was conjuring it up. Every word, every drop of blood. So why couldn't he just tear his eyes from it and move on? "Because you loved me," Hess said, as though Harry had asked the question aloud. "I was a good man, a loving man, but when it came down to it you couldn't save me." He coughed, bringing up a gruel of bilious water. "That must have been terrible," he said. "to be so powerless." It stared at Harry pityingly. "The truth is, you still are," he said. "Still looking to see the Enemy clearly, just once, just once."