Coming off the freeway at the Palomo Grove exit, with four miles to cover to the outskirts of the town, a shudder ran through Tesla. The kind her mother had said meant someone was walking over your grave. Tonight, she knew better. The news was worse than that.
I'm missing the main event, she realized. It's begun without me. She felt something change around her, something vast, as though the flat-earthists had been right all along and the whole world had suddenly tipped a few degrees, everything on it sliding towards one end. She didn't flatter herself for an instant she was the only, one sensitive enough to be experiencing this. Perhaps she had a perspective that allowed her to confess the feeling, but she didn't doubt that across the country at this moment, most likely across the world, people were waking in a cold sweat, or thinking of their loved ones and fearing for them. Children crying without quite knowing why. Old people believing their last moment was upon them.
She heard the din of a collision on the freeway she'd just left, followed by another and another, as cars—their drivers distracted by a moment of terror—piled up. Horns began to blare in the night.
The world's round, she told herself, like the wheel I'm Holding. I can't fall off. I can't fall off. Gripping that thought and the wheel with equal desperation, she drove on towards the town.
Watching for the returning cars, Clark saw lights coming up the Hill. Their advance was too slow to be headlamps, however. Curious, he left his post and started down the incline a little way. He got maybe twenty yards before the bend in the road revealed the source of the light. It was human. A mob of fifty, maybe more, climbing towards the summit, their bodies and faces blurred, but all glowing in the dark like Halloween masks. At the head of the group were two kids who looked to be normal enough. But given the gang they had in tow he doubted that. The boy looked up the Hill towards him. Clark backed away, turning around to put some distance between him and the mob.
Rab had been right. He should have gone a lot earlier, and left this damn town to its own devices. He'd been hired to keep gatecrashers out of the party, not to stop whirlwinds and walking torches. Enough was enough.
He threw his radio down, and clambered over the fence opposite the house. On the other side the shrubbery was thick, and the ground fell off steeply, but he slid away through the darkness not caring if he reached the other side of the Hill in tatters, simply wanting to be as far from the house when the mob reached the gate as he could get.
Grillo had seen sights in the last few days that had slapped the breath out of him, but he'd found a way to slot them into his world-view. But in front of him now was a sight so utterly beyond his comprehension all he could do was say no to it.
Not once, a dozen times.
"No...no..." and so on, "no."
But denial didn't work. The sight refused to pack its bag and leave. It stayed. Demanded to be seen.
The Jaff's fingers had entered the solid wall, and clutched it. Now he took a step back, and a second step, pulling the substance of reality towards him as though it were made of sun-softened candy. The carnival pictures hanging on the wall began to twist out of true; the intersection of wall and ceiling and wall and floor eased in towards the Artist's fist, losing their rigor.
It was as if the whole room were projected on a cinema screen and the Jaff had simply snatched hold of the fabric, dragging it towards him. The projected image, which moments before had seemed so life-like, was revealed for the sham it was.
It's a movie, Grillo thought. The whole fucking world's a movie.
And the Art was the calling of that bluff. A snatching away of the sheet, the shroud, the screen.
He wasn't the only one reeling before this revelation. Several of Buddy Vance's mourners, shaken from their stupor, had opened their eyes to see a sight their worst bad trips had never proffered.
Even the Jaff seemed to be shocked by the ease of the task. A tremor was running through his body, which had never looked so frail, so vulnerable, so human, as now. Whatever trials he'd undergone to anneal his spirit for this moment, they were not enough. Nothing could be enough. This was an art in defiance of the condition of flesh. All the profoundest certainties of being were forfeit in the face of it. From somewhere behind the screen, Grillo heard a rising sound, which filled his skull like the thud of his heart. It summoned the terata. He glanced around to see them coming through the door to lend their maker aid in whatever was imminent. They were uninterested in Grillo; he knew he could leave at any moment and not be challenged. But he could not turn his back on this, however it wrenched his gut. Whatever played behind the screen of the world was about to be seen, and his eyes wouldn't be coaxed from the sight. If he fled now, what would he do? Run to the gate and watch from a safe distance? There was no safe distance, knowing what he now knew. He'd spend the rest of his life touching the solid world and knowing that had he the Art at his fingertips, it would melt.
Not everyone was so fatalistic. Many of those conscious enough were attempting to make for the door. But the disease of malleability that had infected the walls had spread across half the floor. It became glutinous beneath the escapees, pitching as the Jaff pulled, two-handed now, at the matter of the room.
Grillo sought out some solid place in the shifting environment, but could only find a chair, which was as prone to the new vagaries of physics as any other item in the room. It slipped from his grasp, and he fell to his knees, the impact re-starting the flow of the blood from his nose. He let it run.
Looking up, he saw that the Jaff had pulled so hard on the far end of the room that it was distorted out of all recognition. The brilliance of the lights in the yard outside were dimmed, had gone, smeared into a featureless sweep so taut it could not be long before it broke. The sound from the other side had not grown any louder, but became, in a matter of seconds, almost inevitable, as though it had always been there, just out of hearing range.
The Jaff pulled another handful of the room's stuff into his grasp, and in doing so pressed the screen beyond endurance. It didn't tear in one place but in several. The room tipped again. Grillo clung to the heaving floor as bodies rolled past him. In the chaos he glimpsed the Jaff, who seemed at this last moment to be regretting all he'd done, struggling with the raw substance of reality he'd gathered up as if attempting to throw it away. Either his fists wouldn't obey him and release it or else it had its own momentum now and was opening itself without his aid, because a look of wild terror crossed his face, and he screamed a summons to his legions. They started towards him, their anatomies finding some purchase in this shifting chaos. Grillo was pressed to the ground as they clambered over him. No sooner had they begun their advance, however, than something brought them to a halt. Grasping the hides to right and left of him, no longer afraid of them with so much worse on view, Grillo hauled himself upright, or as near upright as was possible, and looked back towards the door. That end of the room was still more or less intact. Only a subtle twisting of the architecture gave any clue to what was happening behind him. He could see through into the hall, and beyond to the front door. It was open. In it stood Fletcher's son.
There were calls greater than that of makers and masters, Howie understood. There was the call of a thing to its opposite, to its natural enemy. That was what fuelled the terata now, as they turned back towards the door, leaving whatever chaos was unleashed inside the house to the Jaff's control.
"They're coming!" he yelled to Fletcher's army, backing off as the tide of terata approached the door. Jo-Beth, who'd stepped inside with him, lingered on the threshold. He took hold of her arm and pulled her away.