"If I take it slowly... very slowly... maybe I won't get crazy."

"So it's not like they say-?"

"I can't see the past, if that's what you mean."

"What about the future?"

"Not from where I'm standing." She drew a deep breath. "We haven't told that story yet. That's why." There was a peal of laughter from the direction of the garden. "Your friend sounds happy," she said.

"That's Raul."

"Raul?" A tentative smile appeared on Tesla's face. "That's Raul? Oh my Lord, I thought I'd lost him...." She faltered, as her gaze found Raul, standing among the last of the blossoming trees. "Look at that," she said.

"What?" said Harry.

"Oh, of course," she said, "I'm seeing with death's eyes." She pondered for a moment. "I wonder... ?" she said finally, raising her hand in front of her, index and middle fingers extended. "Do you want to try something?"

Harry got to his feet. "Sure."

"Come here."

He came to her, a little trepidatiously. "I don't know if this is going to work or not," she warned. "But who knows, maybe we'll get lucky."

She laid her fingers lightly against his jugular. "Do you feel anything?" she said.

"You're cold."

"That's all, huh? Okay, let's try... here." This time, she touched his forehead. "Still cold?" she said. He didn't reply. Just winced a little. "You want me to stop?"

"No," he said. "No, it's... just... strange-"

"Take another look at Raul," she said.

He turned his eyes in the direction of the trees and a gasp of delight escaped him.

"You can see them?" "Yes," he smiled. "I can see them."

Raul was not in the fading garden alone. Maeve was standing close by him, no longer wrapped in drear and mist but clothed in a long, pale dress. The years had fallen from her. She was in her prime; a handsome woman of forty or so, standing arm in arm with a man who surely had lion in his lineage. He too was dressed for a summer evening, and gazed upon his wife as though this was the first hour of their courtship, and he hopelessly in love.

There was a fourth member of this unlikely group. Another phantom-Erwin Toothaker, Harry supposeddressed in a shapeless jacket and baggy pants, watching from a little distance as the lovers exchanged their tender glances. "Shall we join them?" Tesia said. "We've got a few minutes before people start to come sightseeing."

"What happens when they do?"

"We won't be here," Tesla replied. "It's time for us all to put our lives in order, Harry, whether we're dead, living, or something else entirely. It's time to make our peace with things, so we're ready for whatever happens next," she said.

"And you don't know what that'll be?"

"I know what it won't be," she said, leading the way into the garden.

. "And what's that?" he asked, following her through a spiraling shower of petals.

"Like anything we've ever dreamed."

PART SEVEN. LEAVES ON THE STORY TREE

Everville's weekend of portents and manifestations did not go unnoticed. In the days immediately following the events of Festival Saturday and Sunday morning the city came under the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for communities that have produced mass murderers or presidential candidates. Something of strange consequence had happened there, nobody contested that. But nor could anybody quite decide what, not even those who'd been in the thick of it. In fact the people who should in principle have been the most reliable witnesses (those who'd been at the crossroads on Saturday afternoon; those trapped in the Town Hall around two on Sunday morning) were in one sense the least useful. Not only did they contradict one another, they contradicted themselves from hour to hour, recollection to recollection, their talk of quakes and fires and rock falls mingled with details so farfetched as to turn the story into tabloid fodder within a week.

No sooner had these details found pfint-along with the inevitable comparisons to other sites of outlandish bloodshed like Jonestown and Waco-than the city came under scrutiny from a very different selection of examiners-psychics, UFO-ologists, and New Age apocalyptics-their vocal presence further damaging the legitimacy of the story. Television coverage that had been sympathetic on Tuesday was getting wary or even cynical by the end of the week. Time magazine @CP ".." -I pulled a cover piece on the tragedy before it reached the presses, replacing it with a story inside that implied the whole event had been a publicity stunt that had spiraled out of control. The piece was accompanied by an unfortunate, and deeply unflattering, portrait of Dorothy Bullard, who'd been persuaded to be photographed in her nightgown, and was immortalized standing behind her screendoor looking like a lost soul under home arrest. The piece was entitled: Is America Losing Its Mind?

There was no denying that people had perished the previous weekend, of course, many of them horribly. The body count finally reached twenty-seven, including the manager of the Sturgis Motel and the three bodies discovered on the road outside the city, two of them burned beyond recognition, the third that of a sometime-journalist called Nathan Grillo. There were autopsies; there were overt and covert investigations by the police and FBI; there were public pronouncements as to the various causes of death. And of course there was gossip, some of which made it into the tabloids, much of which did not. The story that two skins made of some imitative alien substance were found at the motel did make the pages of the Enquirer. The rumor that three crosses had been found close to the summit of Harmon's Heights, with bodies crucified on two of them and a body of some unearthly creature slumped at the foot of the third did not.

In the second week of reporting, with the 100nier OPiners and witnesses ever more voluble, and the Time interpretation of events gaining adherents daily, the story took on a new lease of life with the suicide of one of Everville's most beloved citizens: Bosley Cowhick.

He was found in the kitchen of his diner at six-fifteen on Wednesday morning, a week and three days after Festival Weekend. He had shot himself, leaving, beside the cash register, a note, the contents of which were leaked to the press the following day, despite Jed Gilholly's best efforts to keep Bosley's last words under wraps. The note bore no address. There were just a few rambling and ill-punctuated lines scrawled on the back of a menu.

I hope the Lord willforgive mefor what I'm doing, he'd written, but I can't go on living any more with all these things in my head. I know people are saying I'm crazy, but I saw what I saw and maybe I did wrong, but I did it for the sake of the baby. Seth Lundy knows that's true. He saw it too and he knows I had no choice, but I keep thinking that God put her into my hands to test me and I was not strong enough to do His will even if I did itfor the best. I don't want to live any more thinking about it all the time. I have faith that the Lord will understand and be with me because He made me and He knows that I have always tried to do His will. Just sometimes it's too much. I'm sorry for hurting anybody. Goodbye.

Inevitably, the mention of Seth Lundy in this pitiful mi'ssive set a whole new trail of inquiries in motion, as Lundy was one of the people who was listed as missing after the weekend. Bill Waits admitted witnessing the Lundy boy being assaulted by two of his fellow musicians, but that story remained uncor-roborated. One of those two men, Larry Glodoski, was dead under highly suspicious circumstances, while the other, Ray Alstead, was in custody in Salem, suspected of his murder. He was being kept sedated, to minimize his eruptions of violence, which seemed to be associated with a fear that the deceased would he coming to find him because he'd seen more than he was supposed to see. Quite what he'd witnessed he would not say, but his obsession with the vengeful dead strengthened the belief among the police psychiatrists that he might well have been responsible for a number of the slaughters that night. He had gone on a rampage, the theory went, and was now in terror that his victims would come to claim him. Waits explicitly denied this-he'd been with Alstead most of the evening, he pointed out-but he'd also been in a highly intoxicated state for much of that time so he was not the most reliable of witnesses.