1

They sat on the edge of an unused luggage carousel on the bottom floor of Newark Airport’s terminal C, away from the new arrivals awaiting their bags. Weezy was wearing brand-new jeans and a yellow, short-sleeve top. Looked like she’d done some clothes shopping since Eddie had picked her up.

Jack had trained down from Penn Station; Weezy had driven Eddie’s car and parked in the hourly lot.

“Here’s what Goren’s daughter looks like,” she said, handing Jack a photo. “Her name’s Alice—Alice Laverty—and it’s a recent shot.”

Jack saw a slim, plain-looking brunette in her thirties walking through what appeared to be a shopping mall.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Kevin took it. He loved the whole espionage thing, playing field agent, following people.”

And being followed, Jack thought.

Weezy was silent, staring at the floor.

“How are you dealing . . . ?”

“With his death? I cried last night, and I cried this morning. But I’m slowly finding space for it, a place to tuck it away. The Compendium helps.”

“You started?”

“As soon as I got to Eddie’s. Jack, it’s . . . it’s like a dream come true. No question the book’s the real thing, an artifact from a forgotten age.”

“The random, shifting page order is something else, huh?”

“When you told me about that, I couldn’t imagine how that could be true, but you weren’t kidding. Kind of confusing.”

“Kind of? They should have called it the Confusium.”

“I can’t wait to get back to it. But in the meantime . . .” She handed him another photo. “Here’s a not-so-recent shot of the man himself from the police report. It was taken about the turn of the millennium, so you can count on him looking older now.”

Jack saw a grinning man with dark hair and graying temples wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the outline of a typical gray alien and the words They’ve Always Been Here!

“Ernest Goren in happier days.”

Weezy nodded. “Before he saw whatever he saw.”

“And torched his home and killed his wife. You don’t know that he saw anything.”

“Something made him crazy.”

“Maybe it was just his time.”

“For what?”

“To break with reality. I mean, he believes in UFOs from the center of the Earth. How big a leap is it from there to Bonkersville where he believes his wife is an alien spy and he kills her?”

“Just because someone has ideas that don’t conform to the mainstream’s concept of reality doesn’t mean they’re psychotic. Look at me.” She shook her head. “No, strike that. I’m not a good example.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’m bipolar. Actually, I’m beyond bipolar. I’m tripolar.”

“But you’ve been right all along.”

“You mean my crazy ideas turned out to be not so crazy after all? How about that?”

“But you were into subtleties. You never believed in the Antichrist or space aliens manipulating events.”

“But something has been manipulating us. I’ve always believed that—I just thought it was the work of secret societies like the Septimus Order. Now, thanks to you, I know it’s so-so-so much bigger. And what about the Antichrist? Wouldn’t R fall into that role? And then there are the believers in the New World Order conspiracy—are they so wrong? Isn’t that what R and the Order are looking to create by opening the gates to the Otherness?”

She had a point. A good one. That brain of hers . . .

“Different interpretations of the same thing.”

“Right. What if the End Times crowd and the UFO folks and the NWO believers, instead of being crazy or deranged or deluded, are blessed or cursed with some sort of sixth sense, some unique form of intuition that allows them to sense the manipulations?”

He remembered a conversation with a strange guy named Canfield at the SESOUP conference.

Jack said, “I have it on good authority that they’re called ‘sensitives.’ Their nervous systems are more attuned to the Otherness than most. They sense the Otherness out there but they don’t know what to make of it. Some go schiz because of the ‘voices’ they’re hearing, and others see conspiracies everywhere or come up with elaborate theories.”

Weezy nodded. “So they’re like the blind men with the elephant. They get to touch only a small area of the beast, and each comes away with a different idea of what it is. In a way, they’re all wrong, but not completely.”

“Right. The New World Order, the gray aliens, the Bible, the Kabbalah, they’re all attempts to explain what people sense going on.”

“All different blind men reporting their interpretation of the elephant.”

Jack shook his head. “Yeah, but what about us? Look at what we believe. It’s far more out there than any of the others. What if we’re crazy?”

“Then it’s a shared delusion—and a doozy. Because it explains everything.”

“The Grand Unification Theory.”

“That’s for physics, but I guess the term fits.” She smiled. “Grand Unification . . . I like that.”

“I can’t take credit. Melanie Ehler, the former head of SESOUP, came up with it. But she never got a chance to prove it.”

He wished he’d never heard of SESOUP. His involvement with the group led him into a situation that drew the attention of the Ally. It paid scant attention to this corner of reality—after all, Earth was already part of its collection—but it decided to begin turning him into a “spear.”

He checked his watch. “I should get going. Half an hour till boarding and I still have to get through security.”

Yeesh.