Chad tired of the entertainment long before that point was reached. Grinding out his second cigar with his heel he sauntered through to see how things were progressing elsewhere. The girl had gone; the hero too. God loves them, he thought. The old man was still lying in the hallway, however, clutching the gun, which he'd retrieved at some point in the proceedings. His fingers spasmed once in a while, nothing more. Chad went back into the bloody chamber, where Breer was on his knees among the meat and the cards, still chopping, and raised Tom off the floor. He was in a languid state, his lips almost blue, and it took a good deal of cajoling to get any action out of him. But Chad was a born proselytizer, and a short talk got some enthusiasm back into him. "Nothin' we can't do now, you know?" Chad told him. "We're baptized men. I mean we've seen everything, haven't we? There ain't nothing in this whole wide world the Devil can fight us with, because we've been there. Ain't we been there?"

Chad was high on his new-found freedom. He wanted to prove the point, and he had this fine idea-"You'll like this, Tommy"-of doing a dump on the old man's chest. Tom didn't seem to care either way, and he just watched while Chad dropped his trousers to do the dirty work. His bowels would not oblige. As he started to stand upright, however, Whitehead's eyes snapped open, and the gun fired. The bullet missed plowing into Chad's testicles by a hairbreadth, but scored a fine red mark on the inside of his milk-white thigh, and whistled past his face to slam into the ceiling. Chad's bowels gave then, but the old man was dead; he'd died with the shot that came so close to blowing off Chad's manhood.

"Near thing," Tom said, his catatonia broken by Chad's near-mutiliation.

"Guess I'm just lucky," the blond boy replied. Then they took their revenges as best they could, and went their way.

I'm the last of the tribe, thought Breer. When I'm gone the Razor-Eaters will be a thing of the past.

He hauled himself from the Pandemonium Hotel knowing that what coherence his body had was fast diminishing. His fingers could barely grip the petrol can he'd stolen from the boot of a car before he'd come to the hotel, and had left, awaiting these last rites, in the foyer. It was as difficult to grasp with his mind as it was with his fingers, but he did the best he could. He couldn't name the things that sniffed at his carcass as he squatted among the rubbish; couldn't even remember who he was, except that he had seen, once, some fine and wonderful sights.

He twisted the cap off the petrol can and spilled the contents over him as efficiently as he could. Most of the fluid simply pooled around him. Then he dropped the can and ferreted, blind, for the matches. The first and second didn't catch. The third did. Flames instantly engulfed him. In the conflagration his body curled up, taking on that pugilistic attitude common to the victims of immolation, the joints shortening as they cooked, drawing arms and legs up into a posture of defense.

When, at last, the games went out, the dogs came to scavenge what they could. More than one of them went away yelping, however, their palates slit by a mouthful of meat in which, secreted like pearls in an oyster, were the razor blades Breer had downed like a gourmet.

XIV After the Wave

Wind had the world.

It blew exactly east-west that evening, carrying the clouds, buoyant after a day of rain, in the direction of the setting sun, as if they were hurrying to some Apocalypse just over the horizon. Or perhaps-this thought was worse-they were rushing to persuade the sun to back up from oblivion for another hour, another minute-anything to delay the night. And of course it wouldn't come, and instead the sun was taking advantage of their fleecy-headed panic to steal them over the edge of the world.

Carys had tried to persuade Marty that all was well, but she hadn't succeeded. Now, as he hurried toward the Orpheus Hotel once more, with the clouds suicidal and the night coming down, he sensed the rightness of his suspicions. The whole visible world carried evidence of conspiracy.

Besides, Carys still spoke in her sleep. Not with Mamoulian's voice perhaps, that cautious, looping, ironic voice that he'd come to know and hate. She didn't even make words as such. Just scraps of sound: the noise of crabs, of birds trapped in an attic. Whirrs and scratchings, as though she, or something in her, was laboring to reinvent a forgotten vocabulary. There was nothing human in it as yet, but he was certain the European was in hiding there. The more he listened the more he seemed to hear order in the muttering; the more the noise her sleeping tongue made sounded like a palate seeking after speech. The thought made him sweat.

And then, the night before this night of rushing clouds, he'd been startled awake at four in the morning. There were dreadful dreams, of course, and would, he supposed, be dreams for many years to come. But tonight they were not confined to his head. They were here. They were now.

Carys was not lying beside him in the narrow bed. She was standing in the middle of the room, her eyes closed, her face infested with tiny, inexplicable tics. She was talking again, or at least attempting to, and this time he knew, knew without a shadow of a doubt that somehow Mamoulian was still with her.

He said her name, but she made no sign of waking. Getting up out of bed he crossed the room toward her, but as he made his move the air around them seemed to bleed darkness. Her chattering took on a more urge pitch, and he sensed the darkness solidifying. His face and chest began itch; his eyes stung.

Again he called her name, shouting now. There was no response. Shadows had begun to flit across her, though there was no light in the room that could have cast them. He stared at her gabbling face: the shadows resembled those cast by light through blossom-laden boughs, as though she were standing in the shade of a tree.

Above him, something sighed. He looked up. The ceiling had disappeared. In its place a spreading tracery of branches, growing even as he watched. Her words were at its root, he had no doubt of it, and it grew stronger and more intricate with every syllable she spoke. The boughs rippled as they swelled, sprouting twigs that in seconds grew heavy with foliage. But despite its health, the tree was corrupted in every bud. Its leaves were black, and shone not with sap but with the sweat of putrescence. Vermin scuttled up and down the branches; fetid blossoms fell like snow, leaving the fruit exposed.

Such terrible fruit! A sheaf of knives, tied up in a ribbon like a gift for an assassin. A child's head hung up by its plaited hair. One branch was looped with human intestine; from another a cage depended, in which a bird was burning alive. Mementos all; keepsakes of past atrocities. And was the collector here, among his souvenirs?

Something moved in the turbulent darkness above Marty, and it was no rat. He could hear whispers exchanged. There were human beings up there, resting in the rot. And they were climbing down to have him join them.

He reached through the boiling air and took hold of Carys' arm. It felt mushy, as though the flesh was about to come away in his hand. Beneath her lids, she rolled her eyes like a stage lunatic; her mouth still shaping the words that conjured the tree.

"Stop," he said, but she only chattered on.

He took hold of her with both hands and shouted for her to shut up, shaking her as he did so. Above them, the boughs creaked; a litter of twigs fell down on him.