It was a long and difficult haul back to California. They found a highway after an hour of wandering, and after another hour a deserted garage along that highway. There Grillo left the lovers, knowing that hitching a ride with such freaks in tow would be impossible. He found a ride himself, after some considerable time, and in a small town bought a beaten-up truck with the entire contents of his wallet, including his credit cards, then headed back to the garage to pick Jo-Beth and Howie up and drive them back to Ventura County. They lay in the back of the truck in a deep sleep, their exhaustion so utter nothing woke them. They arrived back at the Grove just before dawn of the following day, but there was no possibility of access. The same authorities who'd been so slow, negligent, or—as was Grillo's suspicion—complicit in not defending the Grove against the forces erupting in its midst had now, with the eclipse of those forces, become obsessively cautious. The town was sealed off. Grillo didn't challenge the edict. He simply turned around before he came to the barricades, and headed along the highway until he found a place to park the truck and sleep. Their slumbers weren't interrupted. Some hours later, when he woke, he found the back seat empty. His every joint aching he got out, took a piss, then went to look for the lovers. He found them up an incline, sitting in the sun. The transformations that Quiddity had worked upon them both were already in retreat. Their hands were no longer fused, the bizarre forms that had remade their faces had burned away in the sunlight, until they were no more than marks on once flawless skin. With time they too would probably disappear. What he doubted would ever fade was the look in their eyes when they met his gaze: the stare of two people who had shared an experience nobody else in the world had shared, and had become, in that sharing, possessed by each other. More than a minute spent in their presence and he felt like an intruder. The three of them talked briefly of what was wisest to do now, and concluded that staying in the vicinity of the Grove was best. They made no mention of events in the Loop, or in Quiddity, though Grillo burned to ask what it had been like to float in the dream-sea. With rough plans laid, Grillo went back to the truck and waited for them to come down. They came after a few minutes, hand in hand.
There had been no paucity of witnesses to Tesla's relocation of a part of Coney Eye. Observers and photographers both parked on the Hill and hovering above it saw the facade grow smoky, become transparent and finally vanish entirely. With a portion of its structure summarily removed the entire house succumbed to gravity. Had there been only two or three witnesses, doubts might have been cast on the veracity of these accounts. It was only in the pages of the National Enquirer and its fanciful ilk that solid wood and slate were whisked off into another plane of being. But there were twenty-two spectators in all. They each had their vocabularies to describe what they'd seen—some stark, some flowery—but the root facts remained a constant. A substantial part of Buddy Vance's museum to the true Art of America had been snatched into a different reality.
Some of the witnesses (those weariest among the number) even claimed to have caught a glimpse of that place. A white horizon and a bright sky; dust blowing around. Nevada, maybe; or Utah. Any one of a thousand wide open places. America had no shortage of those. The country was huge, and still full of emptiness. Places where a house could reappear and never be found; where mysteries could be happening every day of the week and nobody be any the wiser for it. For a few of the witnesses, seeing what they'd seen, it was the first time it had ever occurred to them that maybe a country could be too big, too full of open space. But it occurred now, and it haunted them.
One of those spaces, at least for the foreseeable future, would be the ground upon which Palomo Grove had been built.
The steady process of its destruction didn't end with Coney Eye's relocation into the Loop. Far from it. The earth had been waiting for a sign, and had got it. Cracks widened to fissures and fissures became chasms, overturning entire streets. The most affected of the villages were Windbluff and Deerdell, the latter virtually flattened by shock-waves from the vicinity of the wood, which disappeared in its entirety, leaving churned, smoking earth in its place. The Hill and its sumptuous properties were dealt as severe a blow; or several blows. It was not the houses immediately below the place where Coney Eye had stood that took the brunt of the destruction (though it would scarcely have mattered—their owners had been among the first to leave, vowing they'd not return). It was the Crescents. Emerson moved south two hundred yards, its houses concertinaed in the process. Whitman went west, the houses, by some quirk of geology, pushed and tipped into their own pools. The other three Crescents were simply laid flat, much of the debris finding its way down the Hill and damaging countless houses in its descent. AH of which was academic. Nobody would be salvaging anything from their houses; the entire area was deemed unstable for six days, during which time fires raged unattended, destroying a large part of the property which the ground had not overturned or swallowed. In this regard the unluckiest village was Stillbrook, the sometime occupants of which might have eventually claimed some of their personal belongings from their houses had a fire not flared in a house on Fellowship Street on a night when the kind of wind that had once brought Grovers out into their yards to smell the ocean been blowing, the gusts driving the flames through the village with devastating speed. By morning half the village was ashes. By the evening of the same day, the other half.
It was that night, the night after Stillbrook burned, and six days after events on the Hill, that Grillo came back to the Grove. He had slept more than half of the intervening time, but he didn't feel that much better for the rest. Sleep was not the palliative it had been. He wasn't eased by it, soothed and comforted by it. When he closed his eyes his head played out scene after scene from the past. Mostl of the show was recent. Ellen Nguyen featured strongly, asking him over and over again to give up kisses and use his teeth; so did her son, sitting in bed surrounded by Balloon Men. There were guest appearances by Rochelle Vance, who did and said nothing. but offered her beauty to the parade: there'was Good Man Fletcher, down at the Mall. There was the Jaff in the upper room at Coney Eye, sweating out power. And Witt alive. And Witt dead, face down in the water.
But starring in the story was Tesla, who'd played out her last trick on him, smiling and not saying goodbye even though she knew it was. They'd not been lovers; not even close. In a sense he'd never quite understood what he felt for her. Love certainly, but of a kind difficult to express; perhaps impossible. Which made mourning her equally problematic.
It was that sense of unfinished business between Tesla and himself which kept him from returning any of the calls Abernethy left on his answering machine back home, though God knows the story itched in him, and itched, and itched. She'd always expressed ambiguity about his making the truth public, even though she'd sanctioned his doing so at the end. But that had only been because she'd thought the issue academic, the world almost finished and little hope left for the saving of it. But the end hadn't come, and she'd died in the act of preservation. He felt honor-bound to keep his silence. Discreet as he was being, however, he couldn't keep from returning to the Grove to find out how its demise was progressing.
The town was still a no-go area when he arrived, police barricades surrounding it. They weren't difficult to bypass. The Grove's guardians had become lax in their duties in the days since it had been sealed off, given that very few people, whether sightseers, looters or residents, had been foolhardy enough to want to tread its turbulent streets. He slipped through the cordon with ease, and started his exploration of the town. The wind that had driven the fire through Stillbrook the day before had dropped away completely. The smoke of that conflagration had now settled, its taste almost sweet in his mouth, like the smoke from a fire of good wood. It might have been elegiac under different circumstances, but he'd learned too much about the Grove and its tragedies to indulge such sentiments. It was impossible to view the destruction without regretting the Grove's passing. Its worst sin had been hypocrisy—going on its blithe, sunny way willfully concealing its secret self. That self had sweated out fears, and made dreams real for a while, and it had been those fears and dreams, not Jaffe and Fletcher, which had finally torn the Grove apart. The Nunciates had used the town for their arena, but they'd invented nothing in their war that the Grove had not already nurtured and fed in its heart.