Ed raised the Chambers gun, but it was too late to get a shot. Bella was gone. He sighed.

'No good will come of this,' he said.

'Oh yes it will,' said Annie. She rolled up the money. 'Better I have it than that little cow. You'll see.'

'She won't rest until you're dead too.'

Towards dawn the two of them trundled the waste bin across the concrete and into the dunes, where Ed buried Tig and Neena and stuck the Monster Beach sign in the sand over them. Annie stood in the fog for a moment, then said, 'I'm sorry about your friends, Ed,' and went to bed; but Ed stayed until the fog cleared, the seabirds began to call and the onshore wind ruffled the marram grass, thinking of Neena Vesicle and how when he was inside her she would tremble and say, 'Push harder. Oh. Me.' Something changed for Ed that night. The next show he did, he dreamed right through his childhood and into another place.

TWENTY-FIVE

Swallowed by the God

Michael and Anna Kearney, with their English accents, careful clothes and slightly puzzled air, drove north from New York City again. This time they were in no hurry. Kearney rented a little grey BMW from an uptown dealer, and they dawdled north into Long Island, then, back on the mainland, followed the coastline up into Massachusetts.

They stopped to look at anything that caught their eye, anything the highway signs suggested might be of interest. There wasn't much, unless you counted the sea. Kearney, with the air of a man suddenly able to accept his own past, browsed the flea markets and thrift stores of every town they passed through, unearthing used books, ancient videotapes and CD remasterings of albums he had once liked but had never been able to acknowledge in public. These had titles like The Unforgettable Fire and The Hounds of Love. Anna looked at him sidelong, amused: puzzled. They ate three times a day, often in waterfront fish restaurants, and though Anna put on weight, she no longer complained. They stayed a night here, a night there, avoiding motels, seeking instead the picturesque bed-and-breakfast offered by retired lipstick lesbians or middle-aged brokers fleeing the consequences of the Great Bull Market. Genuine English marmalade. Views of gull, tidewrack, upturned dories. Clean and seaside places.

In this roundabout way they came again to Monster Beach, where Kearney got them a clapboard cottage facing the ocean across a narrow road and some dunes. It was as bare inside as the beach, with uncurtained windows, scrubbed wooden floors, and bunches of dried thyme hanging in corners. Outside, a few shreds of pale blue paint clung to the grey boards in the onshore winds.

'But we've got TV,' Anna said. 'And mice.' Later she said: 'Why are we here?'

Kearney wasn't sure how to answer that.

'We're hiding, I suppose.'

At night he still dreamed of Brian Tate and the white cat, melting like tallow in the foetid heat of the Faraday cage: but now he saw them increasingly in situations that made no sense. Taking up bizarre formal seated postures, they toppled away from him against a fundamental blackness. The cat, though it looked exactly like an ornament on a shelf, was as big as the man. (This curious detail of scale, the dream's comment upon itself, caused Kearney a rush of misery-strengthless, stark, unbelievably depressing.) Still toppling, they became smaller and smaller, to vanish from sight, gesticulating hieratically, against a background of slowly exploding stars and nebulae.

Compared to this, the death of Valentine Sprake, though it lost in memory nothing of its grotesqueness, had begun to seem like a side-issue.

'We're hiding,' Kearney repeated.

During his third year at Cambridge, before he met Anna, or murdered anyone, he had glanced into a stationer's window one day on his way into Trinity College. Inside was a display of engraved wedding cards which, as he walked past it, seemed for a moment to merge indistinguishably with the discarded bus tickets and ATM receipts which littered the pavement at his feet. The inside and the outside, he saw, the window display and the street, were only extensions of one another.

He was still making journeys under the auspices of the Tarot cards. Two or three days later, somewhere between Portsmouth and Charing Cross, his train was delayed first by repair works along the line then by a fault in one of its power cars. Kearney dozed, then woke abruptly. The train wasn't moving and he had no idea where he was, though it must be a station: passengers prowled outside the windows in the bitter cold, among them two clergymen with that uniform whiteness of hair which has been lost to the laity. He fell asleep again, to dream briefly of the lost pleasures of Gorselands, then woke suddenly in the horrified certainly that he had called out in his sleep. The whole carriage had heard him. He was twenty years old, but his future was clear. If he continued to travel like this he would become someone who made noises in his sleep on the London express: a middle-aged man with bad teeth and a cloth briefcase, head resting uncomfortably in the corner of the seat back as his mind unravelled like a pullover and everything became illegible to him.

That was the last of his epiphanies. By its light the Tarot, generator of epiphanies, looked like a trap. It looked like the drabbest of careers. Journeys-perhaps infinite numbers of them-remained nested within it like fractal dimensions: but the medium had become as transparent to him as the stationer's window, and they were too easy to unpack. He was twenty years old, and the clean yellow front of an Intercity train, rushing towards the platform in the sunlight, no longer filled him with excitement. He had slept in too many overheated rooms, eaten in too many station cafes. He had waited for too many connections.

He was ready, without knowing it, for the next great transition of his life.

'Are we hiding?' Anna said.

'Yes.'

She came and put herself in front of him, close to, so that he could feel the heat from her skin.

'Are you sure?'

Perhaps he wasn't. Perhaps he was waiting. He sat out there on Monster Beach each night after she had gone to sleep. If he expected his nemesis, he was disappointed: for once it was nowhere near. Something in that relationship had changed forever. For the first time since their original encounter, Kearney-though he shook with fear upon confronting the idea-was encouraging the Shrander to catch up. Did he feel it stop? Turn its head, as intelligently as a bird, to listen for him now? Did it wonder why he was trailing his coat?

Out there at night he hadn't much else to do but wait, and watch the ocean waves go in and out beneath the hard stars. Cold offshore winds picked up the sand and trickled it, hissing, between the marram grass on the dunes. There was a shivering luminescence. Kearney had a sense of things as endless: in this scheme the beach became a metaphor for some other transitional site or boundary, a beach at the edge of which lapped the whole universe. What kinds of monsters might wash up on a beach like that? More than the rotten, devolved carcass of a basking shark; more than the plesiosaur for which it had been so briefly and headily mistaken in 1970. Most nights he would go back into the cottage and take out the pocket drive containing Brian Tate's last data. Most nights he turned it over for a minute or two in his hands in the cold blue light of the TV screen, then put it away again. Once, he got out his laptop and connected the drive to it, though he switched neither of them on, going instead into the bedroom where he got fully clothed into bed beside Anna and placed the palm of his hand against her sex until she half-woke and groaned.

By day he played those old records, or sifted through the TV channels looking for anything that passed for science news. Everything seemed to amuse him. Anna didn't know what to make of it. One morning at breakfast she asked him: