NETFEED/NEWS: Church Refuses Exorcism for "Bogeyman"

(visual: child on bed in La Palotna Hospital)

VO: The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has refused the request of a group of close to three dozen Mexican-American parents to perform an exorcism on their children, who claim to have had identical nightmares about a dark spirit they call "El Cucuy"—the bogeyman. Three of the affected children have committed suicide, and several of the others are being treated for clinical depression. Social help agents say the villain is not a demon, but the medical result of too much time spent on the net.

(visual: Cassie Montgomery, LA County Human Services)

MONTGOMERY: "We can't trace the source yet, but I don't think it's a coincidence that most of these young people are latchkey kids and heavy net users. It seems pretty clear that something they've seen or experienced online is provoking these bad dreams. The rest I chalk up to garden-variety hysteria."

What's even more important," the guide said, smiling her professional smile from behind thick goggle-style sunglasses, "is that we now have healthy breeding populations of many threatened birds—the gallinule, or marsh hen, the roseate spoonbill, the Lousiana heron, and the beautiful snowy egret, just to name a few. Now Charleroi will take us into the deep swamp. Maybe we'll see some deer, or even a bobcat!" She was good at her job: it was clear she could manifest the same energy for that line every trip, day in and day out.

Not counting the guide and the young man nominally steering the boat, whose suntanned arms bore the serpentine traces of unignited subdermals and whose facial expression also suggested that some necessary light beneath the flesh had not been switched on, there were only six passengers on this slow weekday afternoon, a red-faced British couple and their small noisy son who was cutting at the duckweed with a souvenir lightstick, a pair of young married professionals from somewhere the the middle of the country, and Olga Pirofsky.

"Please keep your hands out of the water." The guide retained her smile even as her voice hardened to something less cheerful. "This isn't an amusement park, remember—our alligators are not mechanical."

Everyone except Olga laughed dutifully, but the boy still did not stop swiping at the water until his father said, "Lay off, Gareth," and smacked him on the back of the head.

Strange, so strange, Olga thought. So strange, all the years and miles of my life, to wind up here. A bank of cypress loomed ahead in the fast-dissolving morning mist, a gathering of phantoms. Here at the end.

Three days now since she had reached the end of the journey, or perhaps since the journey itself had deserted her. Everything was stasis, pointless as the quiet little guideboat moving along its preprogrammed route across the resurrected swamp. Sleepless through the silent nights, only able to slip into unconsciousness when dawn touched the window blinds of her motel room, Olga could scarcely find the energy to eat and drink, let alone do anything more strenuous. She didn't even know what impulse had led her to buy a ticket for the tour, and nothing so far had made it worth missing the few hours of sleep she might have had in its place. She could see the object of her quest from almost anywhere in the area, after all—the black tower dominated the vicinity as thoroughly as a medieval cathedral its village and fields.

Three days without the voices, without the children. She had not felt so bereft since those distant and terrible days when Aleksandr and the baby had died.

And I can't even remember now what that felt like, she realized. A big emptiness, that's all that's left. Like a hole, and my life since then has just been little things I throw into that hole, trying to fill it up. But I can't feel it.

She never had felt it, she realized—not fully, not truly. Even now it was a blackness that was out of reach, on the other side of some kind of membrane of deliberate ignorance, a thin wall separating her from a horror as complete as the vacuum of space.

If I had ever let it through, she thought, I would be dead. I thought I was strong, but no one is that strong. I kept it away.

"Since the completion of the intracoastal Barrier," the guide was saying, "thousands and thousands of acres of waterway which were being lost to erosion and increasing salinity have been returned to their pristine state, preserved for future generations to enjoy." She nodded, as though she herself had climbed out of bed every morning, smeared on her sunblock, donned her waders, and assembled the barrier.

But it is beautiful, Olga thought, even if it's all an illusion. The boat was murmuring through a patch of vibrantly lavender water hyacinths. Small paddling birds moved unhurriedly out of their way, clearly familiar with what by now must be a generations-old routine. The cypresses were looming closer. The sun had lifted a full span in the east above the Mississippi Sound and the gulf beyond, but the light could not penetrate too deeply among the trees and their knee-high blanket of mist. The darkness between them looked restful, like sleep.

"Yes," said the male half of the professional couple suddenly, "but didn't making the Intracoastal whatever . . . Barrier . . . didn't that utterly ruin like almost all the wetlands that were already there?" He turned to his wife or girlfriend, who tried to look interested. "See, the corporation that owns all this dredged out Lake Borgne over there completely. It was only a few meters deep, then they opened it up to the sea, sank the pilings for that island with the corporate headquarters, all that." He looked up to the guide, a little defiance on his thin face. Olga decided he was an engineer, someone to whom management was usually the enemy. "So, yeah, it was part of the deal that they had to patch the rest of this up, make it a nice little nature park. But it pretty much killed the fishing all around."

"You an environmentalist or something?" the British man asked flatly.

"No." He was a little defensive now. "Just . . . I just follow the news."

"The J Corporation didn't have to do anything," the guide said primly. "They had permission to build in Lake Borgne. It was all legal. They just. . . ." she was reaching, veering an uncomfortable distance off her usual recititativo. . . . "they just wanted to give something back. To the community." She turned and looked at the young pilot, who rolled his eyes but then added a little speed. They began to pass the first cypress stumps, pointy islands breasting the dark water like miniature versions of the mountain that haunted Olga's dreams.

There's nowhere left to go, she thought. I've reached the tower, but it's all private property. Someone even said that the corporation that owns it has a whole standing army. No tours, no visitors, no way. She sighed as the cypresses slid toward them through the mist, enfolding the little boat in mist and angled light.

It was indeed, as the promotional material had claimed, like a watery cathedral, a hall of vertical pillars and hangings, the cypress trees draped with moss like a freeze-frame of liquid flow, the water itself still as a drumhead but for the threading wake of the boat. She could almost imagine that they had passed not just out of the direct sun, but out of the direct surveillance of time itself, had slipped back through millennia to a time when humans had not even touched the vast continents of the Americas.

"Look," said the tour guide, her precisely animated diction puncturing the mood like a needle, "an abandoned boat. That's a pirogue, one of the flat boats the swamp trappers and fishermen used to use."

Olga turned resignedly to see the skeletonized hull of the little craft, its ribs colonized with hyacinths like the capitals of an illuminated breviary. It was beautifully picturesque. Too picturesque.

"A prop," the young professional man whispered to his companion. "This wasn't even swamp until ten years ago—they literally built it after they finished the Lake Borgne project."

"It was a hard life for the people who made their living in the swamp," the guide continued, ignoring the man. "Although there were periodic economic booms in the area, based around fur or cypress wood, the downturns were generally longer. Before J Corporation created the Louisiana Swamp Preserve, it was a dying way of life."

"Don't look like there's a lot of people making a living here now," the British man offered, and laughed.

"Gareth, leave the turtle alone," his wife said.

"Ah, but there are people still making a living in the old-fashioned way," the guide responded cheerfully, pleased that she had been given an easy one. "You'll see on the last stop on our tour, when we reach the Swamp Market. The old crafts and skills haven't been forgotten, but preserved."

"Like a dead pig in a jar of alcohol," the engineer said quietly, displaying what Olga thought was an unexpected gift for simile.

"If it comes to that," the guide said, finally allowing her own defensiveness to show through, "Charleroi's people come from this same area, didn't they?" She turned to the young pilot, who gazed back at her with infinite weariness. "Isn't your family from right around here?"

"Yah." He nodded, then spat over the side. "And look at me today."

"Piloting a boat through the swamp," the tour guide said, her point proved.

As the guide went on to list in great detail the red-shouldered hawk, ibis, annhinga, and other creatures winged and otherwise who frequented the reclaimed swamp, Olga let her mind wander away, lazy as the track through the floating duckweed of yesterday's final tour, which their own boat was following with only the smallest of deviations. A bird the guide identified as a bittern made a sound like a hammer striking a board. The cypresses began to thin, the mist to burn away.

They slipped from the grove to find the stern black finger of God held up before them, dominating the horizon beyond the swamp's vegetative carpet.

"Lord," said the Englishwoman. "Gareth, look at that, darling."

"It's just that building," the child said, rooting in the daypack for something else to eat. "We saw it before,"

"Yes, that's the J Corporation tower," the guide said, as proud of the distant structure as she had been of the Intra-coastal Barrier. "You can't see from here, but the island in Lake Borgne contains an entire city, with its own airport and police force."

"They basically make their own law," the professional man told his partner, who was dabbing her forehead with a handkerchief. He didn't bother to whisper this time. "The guy who owns it, Jongleur, is one of the richest guys in the world, no dupping. They say he pretty much owns the government down here."

"That's not very fair, sir. . . ." the guide began, flushing.

"Are you kidding?" The man snorted, then turned to the British family. "They say that the only reason Jongleur doesn't admit he owns the government outright is because then he'd have to pay taxes on it."

"Isn't he the one who's two hundred years old?" the British woman asked as her husband chortled at the idea of owning your own government. "I saw about him on the tabnets—he's a machine or something." She turned to her husband. "I saw it. Made me go cold all over, thinking about it."

The guide waved her hands. "There is a great deal of exaggeration about Mr. Jongleur, most of it cruel. He's an old man and he's very ill, it's true." She put on what Olga thought of as the Sad Newsreader Face, the one that net people donned when presenting schoolbus crashes or senseless homicides. "And of course he's influential—the J Corporation is the biggest employer in the New Orleans area, and has interests worldwide. They're a major stockholder in many companies, household names—CommerceBank, Clinsor Pharmaceutical, Dartheon. Obolos Entertainment, for that matter, the children's interactive company. What's your name," she asked the little boy, "Gareth, isn't it? Surely you know Uncle Jingle, don't you, Gareth?"

"Yeah. 'Snot fair!' " He laughed and slapped his mother's shin with his lightstick.

"See? J Corporation is involved in lots of things, vested in wholesome and consumer-friendly companies all over the world. We are, as we like to say, a 'people corporation'. . . ."

The rest of the spiel was lost to Olga—in fact, she had stopped hearing what the woman said after the mention of Obolos. In all her years working for the company she did not remember being told anything about J Corporation. But, of course, who paid attention? In a world where every corporate fish was both eater and eaten, who could even tell which fish had swallowed last?

I should have researched the tower, I should have. . . .

But it had been a religious experience, a revelation, not a school assignment. The children's voices had demanded she come, and so she had put away her worldly goods and come.

Uncle Jingle—Uncle Jingle comes from the black tower.

Olga Pirofsky spent almost two more hours in the tiny boat, surrounded by faces whose mouths moved but whose voices she could no longer bear to listen to, an interstellar traveler landed among babbling aliens.

Uncle Jingle is murdering the children. And I helped him do it.

"I don't understand here," said Long Joseph. "Where is this Sellars? You said he was on the phone—you said he was calling and calling on the phone. But now he don't call at all, anytime."

"He said he'd call back." Jeremiah spread his hands helplessly. "He said there were things going on . . . we're not the only ones with problems."

"Yeah, but I bet we are the only ones locked up in a mountain while a bunch of Boer murderers trying to burn their way in and kill us."

"Just settle down, would you? You're making my head hurt." Del Ray Chiume had returned from his brief inspection tour. "Don't pay any attention to him," he told Jeremiah. "Just read us the notes you made—it's not like we have a lot of time to waste arguing."

Long Joseph Sulaweyo didn't like anything much about the way this was going. It was bad enough being trapped in a deep underground base in the middle of nowhere, with only three bottles of anything decent to drink to last God only knew how long, and people outside who wanted to kill him, but now it appeared that Del Ray—Del Ray who Joseph himself had brought here—was making common cause with Jeremiah Dako, ganging up against him.

Joseph could make no sense of it, unless Del Ray, too, was secretly a girly-man as well, and the deep fraternal bond was stronger than other loyalties. Maybe that is the real reason he broke up with my Renie.

"So I am supposed to trust my life to this kak?" he demanded.

"Don't start with me, Joseph Sulaweyo," Jeremiah said. "Not after you just disappeared for days without an explanation, leaving me to handle everything."

"I had to go see my son." But he could not escape a small flitting shadow of guilt. He would not want to be cooped up in this place alone. Perhaps it had not been easy for Jeremiah either. "All right, then, who is this Sellars man? What business does he have with us, that he calls up from nowhere and tells us what to do?"

"The business is trying to save our lives," Jeremiah growled. "And if you hadn't shown up when you did, he would have been the only thing to keep me from being murdered by those men out there."

"That and several feet of battleship steel plate." Del Ray was trying to sound cheerful but hadn't quite succeeded. "There are worse places to be under siege than in a hardened military bunker."

"Not if we don't get things in order," Jeremiah said primly. "Now, are you going to listen?"

Joseph had not entirely buried his suspicions. "But if this man is away in America like you say, how did he find this place? It is supposed to be a big secret."

"I'm not exactly sure. He knows a lot about Renie and !Xabbu and the French woman—he even knew something about that old man Singh. Sellars says he's dead."

"Why he say a thing like that?" Joseph felt a thrill of superstitious fear. It had been so strange holding the empty line, waiting for the voice out of nowhere—the voice that never came. "This man Sellars really tell you he is dead?"

Jeremiah stared, then gave a snort of exasperation. "He said Singh was dead. Singh. The old man that helped Renie and the others. Now will you shut up and listen to what I've written here? There are men trying to break into this place. A folding bed crammed in the elevator door is not truly a long-term solution."

Joseph waved his hand. That was one thing about these homosexual men—like women, they always got so stressed up about things. "Talk, then. I will listen."

Jeremiah snorted again, then looked at the notes he had scribbled in old-fashioned pencil on the concrete pillar. "Sellars says that we can't just block the elevator—that they could come down the shaft. We have to seal off this entire section of the base. He says that the plans show how to do that. But we also have to prepare for a long siege, so we have to bring everything we need down to this place. Joseph, that means you have to haul as much food and water as you can down from the kitchen. We don't know how long we have until they manage to get through the outer doors, so we have to be ready to seal the. thing up as quickly as possible. If we get it ready, then have more time, we'll bring down more food and water."

"What, you want me just to haul those plastic water things like a day laborer? Who is going to look for the guns—Del Ray? You should see him with a pistol in his hand. He is more dangerous to us than to those bad men."

Joseph closed his eyes for a moment. Del Ray said something nasty under his breath. "It's hard to believe there were moments I actually almost missed your company," Jeremiah said. "First, there are no guns, just like there aren't any office supplies. Almost anything small enough to be carried away was taken when they closed this place down. They only left food and water because they thought they might use it someday as a bomb shelter or something. Second, even if we had guns, we couldn't stop these people. You said yourself they were armored like a Special Operations team. Sellars says the best thing for us to do is to seal this off and wait them out."

Long Joseph wasn't sure whether he was sorry or not that he wouldn't be shooting it out with the Boer hitmen. "So what is he going to be doing?" he asked, cocking a thumb at Del Ray.

"Depends. Mr. Chiume, do you know anything about computer systems, electronics?"

Del Ray shook his head. "My degree was political science. I know how to use a pad, but that's about it."

Jeremiah sighed. "I was afraid of that. Sellars said there are lots of patches to be made so that he can help us more. I guess I'll just have to muddle through them myself, if I can figure out his instructions. God, I hope he calls back soon."

"Patches?"

"This is a very old-fashioned system here, twenty, thirty years old or more. I don't know what exactly he plans to do, but he said it was important." He tried to smile. He looked very gray and drawn. "Well, then, Mr. Chiume, I suppose you will have generator duty."

"Call me Del Ray, please. What am I supposed to do?"

"If we're going to be locked down here in the lab, we need the generator, because those men up there will certainly be trying to turn off the main power. We have to have power just to get air in and out of here, not to mention keeping the tanks running." He gestured toward the huge shapes on the floor a level beneath them, tangled in their cables like stones overgrown with clinging vines. "Sellars said we're lucky they have a hydrogen-storage generator down here, not a reactor, because the military would have taken the hot material out of a reactor and we'd have nothing except the main power source."

"I still do not understand," grumbled Long Joseph, his mind full of the unattractive picture of himself carrying dozens of heavy plastic water jugs and food canisters down from the upper level. "What does he know of my Renie? How would she know someone from America, him get all involved with this, with us?"

Del Ray shrugged and answered for Jeremiah. "What are any of us doing here in this strange place? Why did a bunch of thugs come to my door and threaten to kill me because my ex-girlfriend was talking to a French researcher? It's a strange world and it's getting stranger."

"That is the first thing you say all day that makes sense," declared Joseph.

Joseph felt sweaty and irritable, but what was more disturbing was how the empty, echoing halls of the Wasp's Nest base made the sweat turn cold on his skin. Joseph did not like to think of himself as the type to be shivering with fear—although it had happened to him more than once in his life—but neither could he pretend that everything was going to be okay either.

Not going to talk your way out of this one, man, he told himself as he trundled the handtruck into the elevator. Before pushing the down button he cocked an ear, wondering if they would be able to hear when the thugs outside finally broke the code on the massive front door, or whether it would simply swing open silently, allowing the killers to walk in like cats coming through a window by night. All was quiet now; he could not even hear the sounds of Jeremiah and Del Ray two floors below. Only his own labored breathing gave the place life, made it something other than a hole surrounded by stone, as uninhabited as an empty seashell.

The elevator door clunked open. Groaning quietly, Joseph levered the cart into position and began to drag the water supplies along the landing. He could see Jeremiah's feet sticking out from beneath the console, surrounded by various components and cables, and he was reminded briefly of Elephant's storage-bin version of a mad scientist's lab. "It's not a secret anymore," the fat man had said about the military base, and he had been right. Not that Joseph was ever planning to look him up and congratulate him on his accuracy.

"This is all the water," he shouted to Jeremiah's feet. "I am going to bring down the food next. Don't know why—it is nothing but packaged rubbish. Want to kill ourselves after a few more weeks just from eating that."

Jeremiah slid out from under the console wearing a frown on which Joseph could have opened a beer bottle, if he had been lucky enough to have one. "Yes, it's a great shame. Which is why I'm certain that while you were out trotting around southern Africa, and I was cooped up here watching over your helpless daughter, you bought a few treats for me, yes? Some expensive candy bars, perhaps? A dozen koeksisters from the bakery? Something to compensate for leaving me hanging, stuck with nothing but the food you so accurately describe as rubbish?"

Joseph, from long experience with his daughter and others, recognized an argument he was not going to win; he hurried on with the cart to the spot where he had begun his pyramid of water jugs. On the way back, with Jeremiah safely under the console once more and Del Ray nowhere in sight, he paused to look down onto the laboratory floor. The silent shapes of the v-tanks, dusty, dead objects on a museum shelf, abruptly brought tears to the corner of his eyes. Surprised, he rubbed them away.

But one thing, he silently told the nearest pod. One thing is, they are never going to get you unless they go through me first. Somehow I get you back out into the sun again. He was surprised to hear himself making a speech in his own head, but even more surprised to realize what he was saying was true. "You hear me, girl?" he whispered. "Not unless they go through me."

He was afraid Del Ray or Jeremiah would see him, and in any case, the place was stony and miserable as a tomb. He hurried back to the elevator.

Calliope Skouros made a face and put the coffee back down. It wasn't so much that it tasted bad, although it did, the steaming product of one of those little flash-brew drink packets, but that she'd downed so much coffee the night before that even after five hours of ineffective sleep she could still feel yesterday's caffeine hustling around in her system like one of those horrible cheery people who live to organize neighborhood events. Calliope was in a pretty good mood, though. While there wasn't exactly sweeping victory on the waitress front, there was definite progress. Elisabetta (bearer of tattoos and all that coffee) had revealed her name, and now dropped by Calliope's table to chat even when an occasional miscalculation of the seat-yourself policy put the detective in another server's section. To her surprise and pleasure, Calliope had discovered that there was more to the young woman than simply her rough, attractive look. She was an art student—of course—but seemed to have a lot on her mind, and was even willing to listen for short stretches when she could be distracted from the eternal waitress complaints of lousy bosses, sore feet, and problems with rent and transportation.

Interestingly, over several nights' worth of fleeting conversation, the other major component of waitress-misery had not come up: so far there had been no mention of lazy, ignorant, or violent boyfriends. In fact, there had been no mention of boyfriends (or girlfriends) of any kind.

This had better turn into something, Calliope thought, considering the prospect of months lurking amid the garish, beach-party ambience of Bondi Baby. Otherwise, the caffeine alone's going to kill me.

"I'd offer a penny for your thoughts, partner mine. . . ." Stan Chan slipped into the narrow, wallscreened place the cops all referred to as "the green room" and threw his coat over the back of a chair; as usual, the tiny room was practically a sauna. "But I'm sure that I'd be undervaluing. You look utterly deep today. What are they worth? Swiss credits? Real estate?" He gazed at the screen, which showed a dark, thin, scar-covered man. The room where the prisoner sat was empty but for an old table and several chairs, the walls a hideously cheerful orange fibramic tile designed to repel graffiti and, it was reputed, blood. "Speaking of valuable things, is this our friend 3Big?"

Stan was occasionally a bit much in the morning, even when Calliope's head wasn't churning with the perfectly legal equivalent of a couple pops of hotwire. "Can you talk a little more quietly? Yeah, that's him. He's been boxed all night, and now we're going to chat with him."

"Lovely." Her partner really was in a frighteningly good mood. She wondered if he'd had another date or something. "Can I be nasty? Is it my turn?"

"Your turn."

"You're a mate." He paused, frowning, and poked her in the ribs. "You're not wearing your flakkie, Skouros."

"In the station?" She hated wearing the gel-filled vest, an item commonly referred to around the office as "bulletproof underwear."

"Regulations. After all, while he was in the holding cell our friend in there might have manufactured a pistol out of soap and floor lint."

"Yeah, right. No wonder you like to wear yours—it makes you look like you actually have muscles. It just makes me look fat."

"I think of you as the husky angel of Justice." His face turned briefly serious. "You really need to wear that thing. Skouros."

"Okay, I will. Now let's do some work, Mr. Nasty."

Stan snapped his fingers to douse the green room lights so that only darkness would show in the doorway behind them as they stepped through into the glare of the orange tiles. The prisoner looked up at them, his face emptied of anything except for a lip-droop of casual disgust. Calliope liked that—she enjoyed it more when they pretended to be hard.

"Good morning, Edward," she said brightly as she and Stan slid into the chairs across from the prisoner. "I'm Detective Skouros, this is Detective Chan."

The dark man did not reply, but brought a finger up to stroke the long scars on his cheek.

Calliope decided to be puzzled. "You are Edward Pike, aren't you? I'm sure this is the right interview room." She turned to Stan. "Guess this one will have to go back to the box while we figure out the mistake."

"Nobody call me Edward but my mother, and she dead two years," he said sullenly. "3Big, that's how I go. 3Big."

"Yeah, this is him, fear not," Stan said. "Ugly little street beast, just picked up carrying six dozen carts of D-jak wipers in a customized flak belt. Retail weight of Indonesian charge—you're going to do ten years for that, 3-boy, and it won't be in one of the nice places either."

"It was for personal use, seen?" The denial was pro forma—everybody knew they were fencing until the public defender showed up. "I need rehabilitation. Got a bad 'diction, me."

Stan made a spitting noise. "That's going to play, yeah. Judge take one look at you, notice that you were within half a kilometer of a school, she's going to recommend we put you in one of the refuse barges and sink you in the ocean."

Calliope sat quietly for a few minutes and watched her partner moving through the formally aggressive steps of the dance. Edward "3Big" Pike was a habitual, so he knew the motions as well as Stan. He wasn't the worst sort they had to deal with—lots of priors for receiving and handling, and one decent stretch in Silverwater for dealing, but as far as she knew he hadn't ever killed anyone who hadn't tried to kill him first, which in Darlinghurst Road terms practically made him Robin Hood. He was known for being a bit smarter than the average King's Cross street beast, and the fact that he'd only gone down once for dealing testified to that. Calliope wondered if there might be a little pride wrapped up in that, another place they could insert the thin end of the wedge.

Stan had the man snarling and defensive, which meant it was about time for her to start her pitch. "Detective Chan?" She made her voice a little harsh. "I don't think this is the right way to deal with the situation. Why don't you go get a drink of water?"

"Nah, I don't think so." Stan gave the prisoner a stare of radiant contempt. "But if you think you can deal with this curb creature, be my guest."

"Look, Mr. Pike," Calliope began, "technically you belong to Street Crime, so we don't have any formal jurisdiction over you. But if you help us out with a little information—and if it's good information—we might be able to get them back down to simple possession. With your priors you'll still do some time, but it won't be anything too bad."

He was interested but trying not to show it, his heavy-lidded eyes burning brightly behind the surprisingly long lashes. "What you want? Not going to roll over on no one, me. Coming out the box early won't mean nothing if I get sixed first time I touch the Darling."

"We just want some information. About an old acquaintance of yours, someone you spent some time with back in Minda Juvenile. Johnny Wulgaru. . . ?"

His face was blank. "Don't know him."

"Also known as Johnny Dark—Johnny Dread?"

Now something did move beneath the stony features, something swift as mercury rolling in a pan. "You talking about John More Dread? Talking about Dread?" A complicated series of emotions ran across him, ending in a nervous scowl. "What you want with him? He's carked it, right? Dead?"

"Supposed to be. Have you heard otherwise?" She looked, but he had fallen back behind the street mask once more. "We're just trying to clear up an old homicide. A girl named Polly Merapanui."

He was on safer ground now. "Don't know her. Never heard nothing about her." He blinked and reconsidered. "She the one that got her eyes cut out?"

Calliope leaned forward, keeping her voice casual. "You know something about it?"

He shrugged. "Saw it on the net."

"We just want to know if you heard anything about Johnny Dread connected with that crime. Anything at all."

"Not going to roll on nobody, me."

Stan Chan leaned in. "How can you be rolling on anyone if he's dead, you little shit? Talk some sense."

3Big gave Calliope a look of wounded dignity. "This your dog? Because if he don't stop biting my knackers, you might as well put me back in the box."

Calliope waved Stan back into his chair. "Just tell me what you remember about John Dread."

The prisoner smirked. "Nothing. I forgot everything. And if I ever hear anything about him after today, I forget that too. He was one sayee lo bastard. Wouldn't talk slice to him for hard money."

Calliope kept asking questions, augmented by suggestions about 3Big's heritage and social life from Stan that were occasionally rather surreal. If it was a fencing match, the prisoner was not playing to win, but simply not to be scored upon, an unsatisfying experience that went on so long that the last of the caffeine rush finally wore off, leaving Calliope tired and irritable.

"So he's dead, and you haven't seen him for years anyway. That's what you're telling me, right?"

He nodded. "For true."

"Then why do I get the feeling you're holding out? You're facing a long stretch, Mr. Pike. Eddie. Three Bug, or whatever bullshit you want to call yourself. If I were where you are, I'd be climbing across this table right now, trying hard to kiss my big Greek backside, because there aren't going to be many people offering you anything in the next little while. Unless it's someone in the shower when you go back to Silverwater, handing you a chocolate bar to bend over." He was clearly a little surprised by how abruptly she had abandoned the pretense of helpfulness, but he maintained his smirk. "So why won't you talk?

"I'm talking."

"Talk about something real, I mean. We could scrape three to five years off your sentence if you told us something useful about John Dread."

He looked at her for a strangely long time. Stan Chan started to say something, but Calliope touched his knee under the table, asking for patience. 3Big fidgeted with his scars again, sighed, then dropped his hands to the tabletop.

"Look, woman," he said slowly. "I tell you something for free. I don't know nothing about Dread. But even if I did know something, I wouldn't tell you shit. Not for good behavior time, not for reduction, not for nothing."

"But if he's dead. . . !"

He shook his head, his gaze hidden now, curtained behind those long lashes like a panther in a canebrake. "Don't matter. You don't know Dread, you never met him. You cross him, he come back out of the ground and kill you three ways. If there was ever someone be a mopaditi, come back and six you in the dark, Dread do it."

"Mopaditi. What does that mean?"

He had retreated far back now, surveying them as though from the depths of a cave. "Ghost. When you dead, but you don't go away. I'll go back to the box now."

"Well, that was useless." Stan Chan waited expectantly.

"Hang on." Calliope took out her hearplug and popped it into its padded slot in her pad. She wondered again if it was time to invest in a can. It was tedious lugging the pad around, even the new, wafer-thin Krittapong she had bought herself as a birthday present. "Doctor Jigalong is out of town. I've left her messages at work and home."

"About 'mopaditi'?"

"Yeah, I haven't heard that in street slang before, have you?"

"No." He put his feet up on the desk. "That's what, eight, nine of these people we've rousted? Not getting much."

"We got something there."

Stan gave her the eyebrow. "You mean because he used an aboriginal word? In case you didn't notice, Skouros, the man was indeed of aboriginal heritage himself. Don't you say 'hopa!' or 'retsina' or even 'acropolis' every now and then? I've been known to use the occasional ethnic expression myself—I think I called you 'round-eye' just the other day. . . ."

"He reacted when I asked him about Johnny Dread. He was surprised." Something else was bothering her too, some detail, maddeningly out of reach.

"Well, the man is officially dead. Might be reason for surprise, being questioned about someone you thought was dead."

"Might be. But there was something weird about his reaction. Maybe he's heard something on the street."

"Maybe won't get us over the hump, Skouros. What next? Charming as it may be, we're running out of street culture to investigate."

Calliope shook her head, perplexed and distressed and, with the caffeine finally drained out of her system and nothing gone in to replace it, feeling generally pretty godawful.

Sleeplessly out of skew, she sat on the couch and accessed the interview from the department system to run it on her wallscreen. She had decided for her own good to stay away from Bondi Baby. It wasn't even so much the near-obsessive interest in the waitress Elisabetta, but the fact that she had realized she was actually beginning to look forward to the gooey desserts the place served.

Not going to lose any weight that way, Skouros, she told herself. Better to stay home. She hadn't shopped in days, so there was little except crispbread to imperil her determination. She watched the questioning all the way through, then jumped back to the spot where she had first mentioned their quarry's name.

"You talking about John More Dread?" 3Big said, then said it yet again as Calliope backed up and played it over ". . . Talking about Dread?"

That's it, she thought. John More Dread. Haven't heard that one before. But why should one more alias—for a suspect who already had many—catch in her thoughts this way, like a splinter working its way under the skin? More Dread. More Dread. Where have I heard that before?

The thought of the photo taken at Feverbrook Hospital drifted back to her, the blur of dark presence, the formless, smoky face.

3Big Pike said a ghost. If there's anyone who'd come back as a ghost. . . .

She closed her eyes and opened them, trying to use the familiarity of her apartment to push back the feeling of being watched. Of being haunted.

She was back on the balcony again. The tower drew her as though she were a moth and its black immensity some kind of inverse light. Even now, with the voices gone, when she was somehow farther from it than she'd been even back in Juniper Bay, she could not ignore it.

A sparkle of red signal lights ringed the top like a crown of embers, and on the uppermost floors a few windows glowed, illuminated singly or in small clusters. Otherwise, it was only visible against the night sky because of the searchlights that swept across the empty parking lot, glancing off the shiny, irregular exterior as they tracked across the rows of painted stalls.

The voices were gone. The children were gone. Were they one and the same? Olga Pirofsky had been immersed in the dreamy unreality of her southward journey for so long that she could not quite remember. She was exhausted, too. The nights when the children had pulled her and hurried her, whispering their lives into her dreaming ear, had somehow been far more restful than the dead black hours she had experienced after they had fallen silent. Now she woke each day slow-thinking and hollow, feeling like a helium balloon that had finally leaked the last of its buoyancy and could only roll along the carpet, sagging, useless.

So what now? she asked herself. She could not pull her eyes from the tower, the center of its own dark kingdom. Go home? Kill yourself?

But she had no home anymore. Misha was gone, and Juniper Bay seemed like another planet—like the circus, like the dear, sweet murdered days when she had still been with Aleksandr. And she had pushed away those who might have helped her, Roland McDaniel and her other few friends from work, that nice lawyer Mr. Ramsey. There was nothing left for her but silence.

The voices had brought her practically to the foot of this dreadful black mountain before deserting her. Somehow it was all tangled together—the children, the tower, and the grinning, corpse-white features of Uncle Jingle, the mask she herself had worn so long she wondered if it had not somehow shaped the face beneath.

She opened her pad and sat down at the tiny pressboard motel desk. She found her gaze repeatedly swinging to the window, and at last clapped her hands to close the drapes, unable to think with the distraction of that dark warning finger.

Tired, but happy to have made a decision, Olga began to write her open-ended suicide note.