The clear, comprehensible question broke the spell, and brought his panic rushing back. "Does it look contained to you? What the h.e.l.l are you doing out here?"

"I'm waiting, but I think it's too late. We can't wait any longer . . . "

The wind peeled away the seething clouds of smoke, but Vowles could make out no features of the cloaked figure propped on a wooden staff. The bodies laid out before him were painfully visible in the moonlight, the whiteness of their bare skin glowing like cold fire. A man and a woman lay entwined, naked and motionless on the granite altar. Seconds pa.s.sed before he saw the tidal rise and fall of their chests. Asleep and pleasantly dreaming, as if they'd come out here to ball under the stars, and nodded off in the middle of a brushfire.

"What did you do to them? Get away from there!" Vowles charged man on the grinding rock, but the air was thick as Vaseline, and the hooded figure drove the iron-shod end of the staff into his shoulder before he saw it coming, and drove him to his knees.

"I'm saving them," said the faceless man. "Touch me, and the fire will get us all."

Vowles threw himself against the staff, but he got no closer. "We have to get out of here."

"It will not come," the old man said, "while the fire burns." Old, Vowles knew, for in the voice, he heard the same exhaustion that dogged his father's voice, right before his last stroke. "And it must. This must be done."

"Wake them up, d.a.m.n it! We can carry them out-"

"They're not going anywhere, and neither are we."

"Then we'll die! What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?"

"What's wrong," the old man clucked, and hacked out a bitter laugh. "I know the score, that's what's wrong with me. Did you think all of this was free? The land demands a sacrifice."

Vowles had no weapons. He dropped his shovel when he ran from the coyotes, which still sat and watched from the rim of the hollow. He was a part-time firefighter and a finish carpenter in the off-season, and they had never trained him to talk down psychos at Safety Academy. "Hey, mister, I don't want-"

"You don't want anyone to get hurt. Neither do I. Tomorrow, a major earthquake, at least a seven-point-seven, will not destroy most of San Diego and Orange County. Tens of thousands of people will not die, and millions will not lose their homes. Because of this . . . "

"You're trying to stop the Big One?" Vowles said the words with the skeptical unease of all native Californians shared for the prophecy that, one fine day, California would face the judgment of the angry G.o.ds of plate tectonics, and slide into the sea. "There's no fault line within fifty miles of here."

"Not the Big One, but an age of Big Ones. The first cracks in the egg under our feet. It doesn't belong to us, nor do we belong to it."

Vowles still wasn't getting any closer. Pushing at the gelid air, he demanded, "Are you making this happen?"

"Does an antenna make music? There is power here, and it wants to be released.

"The Indians believed that on the day of creation, they were born out of the womb of the earth, but there were spirits in the land, those left behind.

"They are older than the world, but still unborn. They dream life into the world. They long to awaken and shake us off, but they may be tamed-"

The old man knelt before the naked bodies, crabbed hands basking in the residual heat of their embrace. "This is their wedding night."

Way out of his depth, Vowles tried to keep the man talking, "But why does anyone have to get hurt?"

"California was an Eden, once-the people who lived here for ten thousand years never had to invent clothes or weapons or agriculture, but they knew the price. A tribe of shamans lived in this valley. They stole babies from the k.u.meyaay bands to raise as their own, and every generation, they sacrificed a man and a woman, and they lived in paradise until the white men came.

"n.o.body remembers," the old man wheezed. "n.o.body understands what has to be done . . . But some of us have been called . . . We dream, and we remember-"

Vowles picked up a rock and c.o.c.ked it behind his head. "Don't you touch them!"

"I won't," the old man said.

Beneath his feet, Vowles felt the ground crumble and run like an hourgla.s.s draining.

He threw the rock, watched it hang in the air as the ground itself reared up under his feet and tossed him aside. The arrested rock floated over a yawning hole in the earth.

Vowles rolled and jumped back against the wall of the hollow, his hands scratching for another rock.

"I wouldn't look, if I were you," the old man shouted.

Vowles looked.

Something bubbled up out of the hole and exploded into the night sky, a column of rampant, liquid blackness against the fiery horizon. Even as it grew, it shivered with feverish desperation to take on a coherent shape. Crude attempts at eyes and mouths bloomed and dissolved all over it, whole faces popping out and then eating themselves in a shape-shifting totem pole of molten tar.

The human imperative to make order of chaos lured Vowles into staring, trying to make sense of it. Though it tried to mimic the men and the coyotes and the widowmaker tree and all the shapes that thrived and died on the earth, the black, unborn thing was made of the living earth itself. And it was clearly not even a thing, but the tiniest extremity of something unfathomably vast, like the egg tooth of a hatchling, cracking out of its sh.e.l.l.

Breaking like a wave over the grinding rock, the living earth undulated and churned, and when it rolled back, the bride and groom were gone. As it receded, the black tar grew arms and legs and torsos and wistfully caressed itself, melting male and female forms achieving oneness as it slithered out of sight.

The ground shuddered, settled and sank. Vowles clawed at the wall of the hollow, kicked at sand sifting into the collapsing chasm. Cold sweat broke out all over his body as every knotted muscle in him abruptly gave out. Unnoticed, his bladder voided down his trembling leg and pooled in the depression where the long-ago thrown rock fell at his feet.

The old man climbed down from the boulder, slowly, groaning, clinging for support to his staff.

Vowles rushed him again, no rock needed, his fists would do. "What the h.e.l.l was that? You knew it was coming, didn't you? What was it . . . that . . . ate them-"

"I can't say if they're dead, or whether they're not better off, down there." The old man took a step up the trail, seeming to shrivel and sicken, as he retreated from the rock. "That is where we came from, after all . . . "

Vowles jumped after the old man, arms out to tackle him. A coyote hit him across his left shoulder and drove him to the ground. The pack closed in on him, yellow eyes lambent in the guttering firelight, whining under some invisible yoke as they herded him back until the old man climbed painfully out of the hollow.

"You won't get away with this-"

"No, son, I don't think I will." The old man threw back his hood. Shadows blotted his face, brittle and black and crumbling away from his skull when he moved. The face beneath the mask of ashes shone hideously in the moonlight, the sickly glitter of exposed, broiled muscle and charred bone. One eye fastened on Vowles, while the other was a burst, weeping sac.

"Your kids go to school with my grandkids," the old man said. "We shop at the same supermarket, we rent movies from the same Blockbuster. In twenty years, when this has to be done again, praise G.o.d, I won't have to see it. But you . . . if you love this land-"

He vanished. The coyotes howled, and then they, too, were gone.

Vowles ran all the way to the firebreak, shattering blurred panes of orange and black like he was leaping through stained-gla.s.s windows. He ran faster and more frantically than when he was being chased, because the sweat and urine soaking him turned to live steam and scalded him inside his Nomex safety gear.

Firefighters rushed him with blankets, wrestled him onto a gurney in the back of an ambulance, and cut off his clothes. He kept telling them he was fine, he felt great, he wanted to go home. They had to sedate him to make him see the blisters, like the yolks of hundreds of fried eggs, all over his body.

They let Dana take him home after two, and he watched the rebroadcast of the eleven o'clock news in bed with a beer and a handful of prescription Motrin. He thought he saw himself among the tiny, desperate ants toiling on the ridge shot by the news chopper. The fire was ninety percent contained, but the cause was still unknown and chalked up to an act of G.o.d.

Vowles laughed at that, but then they showed more footage of the ridge, the fire and flashing lights the only features on a blackness that might've been the ocean, and the wink of unburned green brush with the white granite stone were laid bare under the searchlights. He cringed as he watched, for fear that the camera saw- Saw what? What really happened? He told n.o.body what he saw. n.o.body ever believed that kind of s.h.i.t from somebody under anesthetic. He was still asking himself what he saw as he nodded off halfway through the lowlights of the Padres game, and each repet.i.tion took him further away from an answer.

The earthquake woke him up in the middle of the night. Before he could wake Dana or even look at the clock, he was falling through the floor and the foundation split open in a jagged black mouth that swallowed the Vowles household.

He found himself jammed more or less upright between the hot, wounded rock walls of a new fault line. His wife and daughters screamed for him in the dark, and he screamed back for them to be calm. The earth shifted, flexing like the muscles of a jaw. Cyclopean molars gritted and ground his family's screams into inert slurping sounds, and now he only screamed to drown it out.

He heard and felt something above his head-purposeful, furious digging. He was going to be saved. He tried to shake free of the rock, but dirt tumbled into his face, choking him. He wriggled and got an arm free, and the debris dislodged by his arm showered his face, and he really did not want to be rescued, now- For he was buried alive upside down, and the rescuer burrowing towards him like a bulldozer was coming for him from underneath- He woke up in the hospital. "It can't happen," he screamed at the nurse trying to strap him down. "It can't happen! We stopped it-"

Dana jolted out of a chair beside the bed to take hold of his mummified arm. The nurse tried to give him something to calm him down, but Dana drove her away.

The news played on the TV bolted to the far wall.

Firefighters had discovered a body in the area cleared by the fire, and identified him as 69-year old Calvin Loomis, a retired US Geological Survey engineer afflicted with Alzheimer's, missing from his home since he wandered away, two days ago. An old snapshot appeared on-screen: soft, sunny, Elmer Fudd features, white, crewcut hair, and freckled, ruddy skin. Vowles recognized the face; he'd seen it in the crowd in the opposing team's bleachers at one of his daughters' softball games.

The Caltech Seismological Laboratory reported a 2.4-magnitude seismic hiccup at eight-thirty tonight, directly underneath central San Diego. The short violence of the spike, which the geologists explained as vertical realignment from very deep in the crust, had gone mostly unnoticed throughout the state. This kind of settling was actually beneficial, said the newscaster, beaming rea.s.surance, and disproved outmoded doomsday scenarios about the Big One. The East Pacific Plate still pushed coastal California northward at a stately two inches per annum, but no ugly seismic surprises lay in store for the foreseeable future.

Not so lucky was some city in central Mexico, flattened and devoured by a 6.4 quake. He didn't catch the name of the vanished place-they might not even have said it-but three hundred were dead, thousands wounded and another several hundred missing.

The volcano on the big island of Hawaii was acting up again, with lava flows causing the evacuation of guests at two imperiled hotels. China denied that an earthquake had killed hundreds at a labor camp in Mongolia.

There was something about a missing local newlywed couple, but already, when he recalled the image of those naked, slumbering bodies swallowed up by the living bowels of the earth, he saw it through a pixilated filter, with a news logo slapped on it, two more strangers dying. Strangers died every day- It happened, he told himself. You know it did. The land took them. It had to happen-what has to be done- He loved this city, this land, as much as anyone who lived there ever did. In twenty years, he would still live here, and his children would live here, and, G.o.d willing, they would raise children here, too.

And somebody would have to do something . . .

. . . the s.n.a.t.c.hes of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.

"The Shadow Out of Time" H.P. Lovecraft (1936).

* DETAILS *

China Mieville.

When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at pa.s.sing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn't an outsider. But I wouldn't join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn't understand why I wouldn't come.

I don't remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.

On Wednesday mornings at about nine o'clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelt of old wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the pa.s.sage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs. Miller's room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.

Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. Occasionally I'd meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller's room, swearing in a strong c.o.c.kney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

"Come on, you old slag," he wailed, "you sodding old slag. Come on, please, you cow."

His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I could hear her voice. Mrs. Miller's voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller's food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflower with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and sometimes a plas0tic bucket full of white paint.

So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller's door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I'd hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.

"h.e.l.lo," she would call, and then say my name a couple of times. "Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?"

I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door suddenly swung open a s.n.a.t.c.h, just a foot or two, and I thrust the bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in my face.

I couldn't see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller's sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman's eager face.

If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

"How's your mother?" she would shout. At that I'd unfold my mother's careful queries. She's okay, I'd say, she's fine. She says she has some questions for you.

I'd read my mother's strange questions in my careful childish monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

"Tell your mother she can't tell if a man's good or bad from that," she'd say. "Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father." Or: "Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about." "Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.

"I can't help her with that," she told me once, quietly. "Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly." And my mother did, and she got well again.

"What do you not want to do when you grow up?" Mrs. Miller asked me one day.

That morning when I had come to the house the sad c.o.c.kney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

"He's begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he's so b.l.o.o.d.y angry," he was shouting, "only it ain't you gets the sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I'm on me knees. . . . "

"My door knows you, man," Mrs. Miller declared from within. "It knows you and so do I, you know it won't open to you. I didn't take out my eyes and I'm not giving in now. Go home."

I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I knocked on her door and announced myself. It was after I'd given her the food that she asked her question.

"What do you not want to do when you grow up?"

If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliche would have annoyed me: It would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

I don't want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, b.l.o.o.d.y smarta.r.s.e lawyers.

Mrs. Miller was delighted.

"Good boy!" she snorted. "We know all about lawyers. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, right? With the small print! Never be tricked by the small print! It's right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you seen it it's got you!" She laughed excitedly. "Don't let the small print get you. I'll tell you a secret." I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

"The devil's in the details!" She laughed again. "You ask your mother if that's not true. The devil is in the details!"

I'd wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished eating, and then we'd reverse our previous procedure and she'd quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next Wednesday, along with the Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she'd see me in the afternoon.

I wasn't afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned and only a little bit nervous.