He immediately started down the way they'd come, the rock marked in several places by splashes of Byrne's blood. At one such spot, after ten minutes of descent, he looked back to see if he could spot the man, but the heights were dark and, as far as he could see, empty. The last remaining souls had gone from the smoke tower; and with them much of the light. There was no sign of Byrne.
When he turned back, there was. The man was standing two or three yards lower down the slope. The multitude of wounds he'd collected on his way up were nothing beside his newest. It ran from the side of his head to his hip, and had opened him up to his innards.
"I fell," he said simply.
"All the way down here?" Howie said, marvelling at the fact that the man was even standing.
"No. I came down of my own accord."
"How?"
"It was easy," Byrne replied. "I'm larvae now."
"What?"
"Ghost. Spirit. I thought maybe you'd seen me fall."
"No."
"It was a long drop, but it ended well. I don't think anybody ever died on the Ephemeris before. That makes me one of one. I can make my own rules. Play it any way I like. And I thought I should come help Howie—" His obsessive heat had been replaced by a calm authority. "You have to be quick," he said. "I understand a lot of things suddenly, and the news isn't good."
"Something's happening, isn't it?"
"The Iad," Byrne said. "They're starting across Quiddity." Terms that he hadn't known minutes before were now commonplace from his lips.
"What are Iad?" Howie asked.
"Evil beyond words," Byrne said, "so I won't even try."
"Going to the Cosm?"
"Yes. Maybe you can get there ahead of them."
"How?"
"Trust to the sea. It wants what you want."
"Which is?"
"You, out, " Byrne said. "So go. And quickly."
"I hear."
Byrne stood aside to let Howie pass. As he did so he took hold of Howie's arm with his good hand.
"You should know—" he said.
"What?"
"What's on the mountain. It's wonderful."
"Worth dying for?"
"A hundred times."
He let go of Howie.
"I'm glad."
"If Quiddity survives," Byrne said. "If you survive this, look for me. I'm going to be wanting words with you."
"I will," Howie replied, and began down the slope as fast as he was able, his descent veering between the ungainly and the suicidal. He started to yell Jo-Beth's name as soon as he came within what he guessed was hailing distance, but his call went unheeded. The blonde head didn't look up from its study. Perhaps the sound of the waves was drowning him out. He reached beach level in a scrambling, sweaty daze and began to race towards her.
"Jo-Beth! It's me! Jo-Beth!"
This time she did hear, and she looked up. Even with several yards between them he could see clearly the reason for her stumbling. Horrified, he slowed his pace, barely aware he was doing so. Quiddity had been at work on her. The face he'd fallen in love with at Butrick's Steak House, the face from the sight of which he dated his life, was a mass of spiky growths that spread down her neck and disfigured her arms. There was a moment, one he'd never quite forgive himself for, in which he wished she wouldn't know him, and he'd be able to walk on past her. But she did; and the voice that came from behind the mask was the same that had told him she loved him.
Now it said: "Howie...help me..."
He opened his arms and let her come into them. Her body was feverish, racked with shudders.
"I thought I'd never see you again," she said, her hands over her face.
"I wouldn't have left you."
"At least we can die together now."
"Where's Tommy-Ray?"
"He's gone," she said.
"We've got to do the same," Howie said. "Get off the island as quickly as possible. Something terrible's coming."
She dared to look up at him, her eyes as clear and blue as they'd ever been, staring out at him like the gleam of treasure in muck. The sight made him hold her tighter, as if to prove to her (and to himself) that he'd mastered the horror. He hadn't. It was her beauty that had first taken his breath away. Now that was gone. He had to look beyond its absence to the Jo-Beth he'd later come to love. That was going to be hard.
He looked away from her, towards the sea. The waves were thunderous.
"We have to go back into Quiddity," he said.
"We can't!" she said. "I can't!"
"We've got no choice. It's the only way back."
"It did this to me," she said. "It changed me!"
"If we don't go now," Howie said, "we never go. It's as simple as that. We stay here and we die here."
"Maybe that's for the best," she said.
"How can that be?" Howie said. "How's dying for the best?"
"The sea'll kill us anyway. It'll twist us up."
"Not if we trust it. Give ourselves over to it."
He remembered, briefly, his journey here, floating on his back, watching the lights. If he thought the return trip would be so mellow he was kidding himself. Quiddity was no longer a tranquil sea of souls. But what other choice did they have?
"We can stay," Jo-Beth said again. "We can die here, together. Even if we got back—" she started to sob again, "—even if we got back I couldn't live like this."
"Stop crying," he told her. "And stop talking about dying. We're going to get back to the Grove. Both of us. If not for our sakes, then to warn people."
"About what?"
"There's something coming across Quiddity. An invasion. Heading home. That's why the sea's going wild."
The commotion in the sky above them was every bit as violent. There was no sign, either in sea or sky, of the spirit-lights. However precious these moments on the Ephemeris were, every last dreamer had forsaken the journey, and woken. He envied them the ease of that passage. Just to be able to snap out of this honor and find yourself back in your own bed. Sweaty, maybe; scared, certainly. But home. Sweet and easy. Not so for the trespassers like themselves, flesh and blood in a place of spirit. Nor, now he thought of it, for the others here. He owed them a warning, though he suspected his words would be ignored.
"Come with me," he said.
He took hold of Jo-Beth's hand and they headed back along the beach to where the rest of the survivors were gathered. Very little had changed, though the man who'd been lying in the waves had now gone, dragged away, Howie presumed, by the violence of the sea. Apparently nobody had gone to his aid. They were standing or sitting as before, their lazy gazes still on Quiddity. Howie went to the nearest of them, a man not much older than himself, with a face born for its present vacuity.
"You have to get out of here," he said. "We all have to."
The urgency in his voice did something to rouse the man from his torpor, but not much. He managed a wary "Yeah?" but did nothing.
"You'll die if you stay," Howie told him, then raised his voice above the waves to address them all. "You'll die!" he said. "You have to go into Quiddity, and let it take you back."
"Where?" said the young man.
"What do you mean, where?"
"Back where?"
"To the Grove. The place you came from. Don't you remember?"
There was no answer forthcoming from any of them. Maybe the only way to get an exodus going was to start it, Howie reasoned.
"It's now or never," he said to Jo-Beth.
There was still resistance, both in her expression and in her body. He had to take firm hold of her hand and lead her down towards the waves.
"Trust me," he said.
She didn't answer him, but nor did she fight to stay on the beach. A distressing docility had come over her, its only virtue, he thought, that maybe Quiddity would leave her alone this time. He was not so sure it would treat him with such indifference. He was by no means as detached from high emotion as he'd been on the outward journey. There were all kinds of feelings running rife in him, any or all of which Quiddity might want to make play with. Fear for their lives ranked highest, of course. Close after, the confusion of repugnance at Jo-Beth's condition and his guilt at that repugnance. But the message in the air was urgent enough to keep him moving down the beach in spite of such anxieties. It was almost a physical sensation now, which reminded him of some other time in his life, and of course of some other place; a memory he couldn't quite grasp. It didn't matter. The message was unambiguous. Whatever the Iad were, they brought pain: relentless, unendurable. A holocaust in which every property of death would be explored and celebrated but the virtue of cessation, which would be postponed until the Cosm was a single human sob for release. Somewhere he'd known a hint of this before, in a little corner of Chicago. Perhaps his mind was doing him service, refusing to remember where.