In the morning I pushed open the door and had a look round. The mountains loomed above us. Granite flanks rising into fangs of snow and ice that themselves vanished into fuming dark clouds, fans of windblown ice blown into semi-permanent plumes from the scarps. Back in Yonder, the mountains had seemed huge, but viewed up close they were the roots of a world, the bottom of a place boundless and terrible, a border between trouble and emptiness. Their names, if they had names, would be violent hatcheting sounds followed by a blast of wind. They offered no hint of happy promise. A chill bloomed inside me from a recognition of my folly, of having given up on Yonder and put Annie and myself in the way of far worse. But when Annie came to stand beside me, all I said was, "Looks like it's gon' get cold."

She stood gazing up at the mountains and said, "Yeah, looks like." She went over to the sleeping bags and dug a down jacket out of her pack.

On the outside of the car, next to the door, were several gouges that appeared to be scabbing over with filmy black stuff, the golden congealed blood showing through. I glanced at the mountains again and thought I saw a flash of lightning in the clouds,

"Close the door," Annie said. "We'll be there soon enough. Ain't no use in starin' at it."

I slid the door shut and sat beside her. "It's just mountains," I said.

She gave a sniff of laughter. "Yeah, and Godzilla's just tall."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry if this turns out wrong. I didn't … It felt right to leave."

"I ain't gon' blame you. I coulda stayed." Then after a pause, she said, "I'm glad I didn't stay. I couldn't tolerate Yonder no more."

That surprised me a little, though I'd expected she would come around to admitting it eventually. "We probably don't go way high up in 'em," I said. "Tracks wouldn't get built that high."

"They ain't real tracks and nobody built 'em."

"Well, yeah. There's that." I tried to think of something comforting to say. "'Member the Wizard of Oz. How he had this fearsome voice, but he turned out to be a little fat guy and the voice was fake? The mountains are probably like that."

"Dorothy and the Scarecrow," she said dispiritedly. "That's us, all right." She worked a hand in down among the clothes in her pack and pulled out a deck of cards. "Wanna play some gin?"

So we ate jungleberries to calm our nerves and played cards as the train ascended into the mountains, going over the Wall. We played for a dollar a point, double for gin, and after a while we began to joke and laugh, and for the most part forgot about the wind, which had started howling around the car, and the cold that was gradually seeping inside. Annie kicked my butt for the first hour, but then I had a run of luck and went up several hundred dollars. I dumped the next game to bring us closer to even, and as I shuffled and dealt the cards, I thought of other rides we'd taken both separately and together, beat-up and fucked-up, drunk and stoned, sick and afraid, and how it seemed all that had been preparation for this ride up into wherever. Maybe it had been a form of preparation, maybe the world was so painstaking and intricate in its wisdom that part of its process was to prepare those who failed it for a wild ride into an unknown land. But Annie was right. True or not, it was useless knowledge. It was the kind of thing you did not need to live. The arguments of doctrine and the study of philosophy, they might or might not have validity, but the only functions they served were either to exercise the mind or, if pursued to excess, to blind you to the bitterness of life and keep you from the more joyful practices necessary to withstand it.

"Hey," said Annie, beaming. "Guess what?"

"What?" I said.

She spread out her hand for me to see. "Gin!"

"What's it like out there?" Annie asked.

"Like a whole buncha nothin'. Got some serious fog." I sat back down, watched her deal. "We must be down in a pocket."

Done with dealing, Annie studied her cards, glanced at me, and said, "Your turn."

I picked up my hand, made a stab at arranging it. "Fog's not even driftin'. You'd think with all the wind, it'd find some way to blow a little bit down where we are."

"Got any threes?" she asked, and laid down a three.

I started to pick up the card, changed my mind, and drew from the deck. "Maybe it ain't all wind. Maybe it's somethin' else goin' on that sounds like wind."

"C'mon, Billy," she said. "Play a card. Even if it's the last thing I do, I'm gonna beat you silly."

There came a noise, then. A shriek … except it didn't come from any throat. It was more an electronic note edged with bursts of static, and it was loud—loud as a police siren suddenly switched on behind you. We dropped the cards, scrambled farther away from the door, and as we did, the shriek sounded again and a brilliant white flash cut a diagonal seam across the door, like someone was outside and swinging a magnesium torch at the car. The heat that came with it had that kind of intensity. The walls of the car rippled, the floor humped beneath us. For a fraction of a second, the seam glowed too brightly to look at, but it faded quickly, and we saw that a rip had been sliced in the door, leaving an aperture about six inches wide and three feet long. I heard distant shrieks, identical to the one I'd initially heard, and thereafter a tremendous explosion that reminded me in its magnitude of dynamite charges I'd set when working highway construction the summer after high school. Whatever the car was made of—skin, metal, plastic, a combination of things—its torn substance had been somehow sealed, cauterized, and there was not the slightest seepage of golden blood. We heard more explosions and shrieks, but when after a few minutes nothing else struck the car, we went over to the rip and peered through it. Annie gasped, and I said, "Jesus …" Then, both inspired to act at the same time, we slid the door wide open so we could get a better look at where we were bound.

What I saw I need to describe carefully, slowly, though I seemed to see and absorb it all at once. We were barreling along a snow-covered valley, featureless except for boulders that jutted up here and there, a rift that ran straight as a highway between rows of mountains, a diminishing perspective of giants, brothers to the ones ranged along the plain. They were set close together, without any linkage between them, no ridges or shoulders that merged one into another, and this placement made them seem artificial, a landscape that had been created without the restraints of inorganic logic. Cliff faces of black rock broke from their icy slopes. Beneath the smoky clouds that shrouded the peaks, the sky was alive with bright flying things—blazing golden-white, they might have been sparks shaped into the raggedy images of birds. They wheeled and whirled and curvetted everywhere, sounding their electric voices. There were so many, it amazed me that they did not constantly collide. Every now and then a group of several hundred would form into a flock and arrow down to strike the cliff faces, disappearing like a beam of light into a void, and thereafter, following the briefest of intervals, an explosion would occur, producing not fragments of rock and gouts of fire, but violet rays that streamed off toward the end of the valley in the direction we were headed. I had the feeling that I was watching the operation of a vast engine designed to create those rays, but what the rays were fueling—if that's what they were doing—was so far outside the scope of my experience, I had no way to interpret it.

Once when I was drunk in Kalispell, flush from the sale of some copper wire I'd stolen from the freight yard there, I wandered into a souvenir shop and became interested in the mineral samples they sold. What especially caught my eye was a vial of black opals immersed in water, and after studying them for a while, glossy black stones that each contained a micro-universe of many-colored flecks of fire, I bought them for fifteen dollars—I would have stolen them, but the clerk had his eye on me. At the far end of the valley the land gave out into a place similar to those depths embedded in the stones, a blackness that appeared one second to be bulging toward us, and the next appeared to be caving in. Countless opalescent flecks trembled within it, and whenever the violet rays penetrated the blackness, it would flicker as with heat lightning and for an instant I would have a glimpse of something that had been obscured. The glimpses were too brief for me to identify the thing, but I had a sense it was a complicated branching structure, and that it went a long way in … Another explosion, and I realized what had happened to the door of our car. As the explosion occurred and a violet ray spat forth, the spark birds closest to it went swerving out of control and tumbled from the sky. Several came swerving low above the train before righting themselves and rejoining the others.

We gazed at the scene until the cold drove us back inside the car, and then we sat huddled together without speaking. I can't say what was in Annie's mind, but I was more awestruck than afraid. The scale of the mountains, the strangeness of all else—it was too grand to breed true fear, too foreign to inspire other than wonder, and too startling to allow the formation of any plan. Hobos, for all their degenerate failings, have an aesthetic. They're scenery junkies, they take pride in traveling through parts of their country few have ever seen, and they memorialize those sights, whether storing them in their memories or creating more tangible mementos, like SLC with his wall of Polaroids. Sitting around campfires or in squats, they'll swap stories about the natural beauty of the world with the enthusiasm of kids trading baseball cards. Now Annie and I had a story to top anybody's, and though we had no one to tell it to, as if by reflex, I polished the details and dressed up the special effects so if I ever did get the chance, I'd be ready to let the story rip. I was kept so busy doing this—and maybe Annie was, too—I didn't notice the train was slowing until we had dropped more than half our speed. We went to the door, cracked it, and peered out. We were still in the valley, the mountains still lifted on either side, the spark birds were still wheeling in the sky. But the opaline blackness that had posed a horizon to the valley was gone. In place of it was a snow-covered forest beneath an overcast sky and, dividing the forest into two distinct sections, a black river that sprung up out of nowhere and flowed between those sections, as straight in its course as that of the valley between the ranked mountains. It was clear the train was going to stop. We got our packs together and bundled up—despite the freakishness of the forest and river, we figured this was our destination, and were relieved to be alive. When the train came to a full stop, we jumped down from the car and set off across the snow, ducking our heads to avoid the wind, which was still blowing fiercely, our feet punching through the frozen crust and sinking calf-deep.

The train had pulled up at the end of the line; the tracks gave out beyond the last mountain, about a mile and a half, I judged, from the edge of the forest. The ground ahead of us was gently rolling, the snow mounded into the shape of ocean swells, and the forest, which looked to be dominated by oaklike trees with dark trunks and heavy iced crowns, had a forbidding aspect, resembling those enchanted and often perilous forests illustrated in the children's books that the old Billy Long Gone had turned to now and then, wanting to read something but unable to do more than sound out a few of the words. When we reached the engine I took the can of spray paint Pie had given me and wrote on the side:

"Wanna add somethin'?" I asked Annie.

She studied on it, then took the can and wrote:

"A test, huh?" I took back the can and stowed it.

"I been thinkin' about it," she said. "And that's what I figure it is. It just feels that way."

"Here you always talkin' 'bout you can't stand theories, and now you got one of your own."

"It ain't a theory if you're livin' it," she said. "It's a tool for making decisions. And from now on I'm lookin' at all this like it's a test." She helped me rebuckle the straps of my pack. "Let's go."

We had walked about two-thirds of the distance between the end of the tracks and the forest when one of the mounds of snow on our left shifted and made a low grumbling noise, like something very large waking with mean things on its mind. It was so sudden an interruption to the winded silence, we froze. Almost immediately, another mound shifted and grumbled … and then another.

"Run!" said Annie, unnecessarily—I was already in motion, not quite running but moving as fast as I could, plunging ahead, my legs going deep into the snow. There was no wonderment in me now, only fear. We thrashed our way through the snow, the wind cutting into our faces, while all around us were shiftings and ugly animal rumbles. We angled toward the left-hand section of forest, a point not far from where the black river sprang from beneath the earth. The trees seemed to inch nearer, and as I glanced behind me to gauge how close pursuit was—if, indeed, something was in pursuit—I tripped and fell. Annie screamed at me to hurry. As I staggered up, fighting for balance, I saw that several of the mounds had risen to their feet. They were heavy-bodied, slothlike, big as delivery vans, with long silky white hair shaggying their thick legs and backs. The hair fell into their faces, which were mushed-in, startlingly human except for their extremely wide mouths. Their eyes, half-hidden, were bright and violet, the same exact shade as the rays that erupted from the cliff faces. One started toward me, waddling slowly, but gaining momentum, and I plunged forward again, my breath steaming out, heart pumping, trying to will myself ahead and into the shadowed avenues among the trees. Even at top speed, apparently, the slothlike creatures were slow, and I thought we were going to make it. But at the edge of the forest, just as I stumbled almost breathless beneath a low-hanging bough, Annie grabbed my jacket and hauled me to a stop.

"The river!" She said, gasping. "We gotta go for the river!"

"You're outa your mind!" I tried to shake her off, but she clung to me.

"It's a test!" she said. "Like back in Yonder … the mountains looked like the worst option. But we got through 'em. Now the river looks like the worst. That's the way out. I know it!"

The nearest of the sloths was a couple hundred feet away, and about a dozen more were edging up behind him, all grunting as they came, sounding like stalled engines trying to turn over. I started to run again, but Annie kept a hold on me and dragged me down to my knees beside her.

"Godammit, Billy!" She shook me. "They can follow us into the forest! But the river … maybe they won't go there!"

The logic of that penetrated my panic. I dragged her up and we went lurching, half-falling, ploughing toward the bank. But on reaching it, I hesitated. The way it ran straight, like a long black sword laid flat across the land, its point invisible beyond the horizon, dividing everything from nothing. The Styx. Charon. Mythic images of death crowded into my brain. The water was flowing up fast from wherever it came. Snow crusts fallen from the bank floated on it. Cold as it looked, I doubted we'd last more than a minute or so. Beneath the surface were glitterng points that reminded me of the beardsley's eyes. The slothlike creatures lumbered near. Their mouths were partially obscured behind fringes of hair, but they were wide enough to swallow us both without stretching. The shine of their violet eyes stained the snow in front of them, as if they were nothing but energy inside, no guts, no bones, just a furnace of violet glare. Their footfalls made no sound. Freeze or get chewed. It was not an easy choice.

"Billy!" Poised on the brink, Annie pleaded with me, but I couldn't take the step. Then her face seemed to shut down, all her caring switched off, as if it, too, had been a light inside her, and she jumped, disappearing from sight with a sodden splash. She did not resurface, and I knew she must be dead, killed by the shock. When I understood that, I didn't much care which way I went to hell.

Behind me, the grunting evolved into a piggish squealing. Two of the animals had begun to fight, batting with their enormous paws, mauling each other, trying to bite with mouths that opened into pink maws the size of loading bays. I watched their incompetent white battle for a second, unconcerned, empty of awe, of fear, of all feeling. I saw the mountains beyond, the sky whirling with sparks, and it seemed I could see all the way back to Yonder, the tree full of hobos, the green river, the jungle, the gorge where Euliss had died. But I could no longer see the world. It was like smoke in my memory, its images dissolving, or already dissolved. Alone and cut off from all I had known, I had little use for life. For no better reason than it was where she had vanished, I jumped into the river after Annie.

The hollow was spanned by the crown of a tree with a thick grayish white trunk and milky green leaves. The sky was overcast, and the air cool like summer air at altitude, carrying an undertone of warmth. I felt no weakness, no fatigue—in fact, I felt strong in all my flesh, as if newly created. I looked at the others. Apart from Annie, who was just beginning to stir, there were two men and a woman. One man, lying on his back, eyes closed, was dark, lean, bearded. Dressed in a fatigue jacket, blue pin-striped trousers that must have belonged to an old suit and were tucked into his boots. Next to his outflung left hand were a small backpack and an automatic rifle. The other two were asleep in an embrace. Brown-skinned; tiny; wearing rags. Mexican, I thought, judging by the man's Aztec features. I picked myself up, went over to the bearded man, and examined his rifle. Words in the Cyrillic alphabet were incised on the housing. To be on the safe side, I pocketed the clip.

I checked on Annie—she was still asleep—and then scrambled up the slope of the hollow. When I reached the top I saw a city sprawling across the hills below, surrounded by forest on every side. On the edges of the city were new shacks and cabins carpentered from raw unpainted boards and logs. The buildings farther away were older, weathered, but not many were larger than the buildings on the outskirts, and they were only two- and three-stories tall. It was like a frontier town with dirt streets, but much bigger than any I'd ever heard of. A shanty metropolis. People were moving along the streets, and I made out animals pulling carts … whether oxen or horses or something else, I could not say. But the city was not the dominant feature of the view. Rising from its center, vanishing into the depths of an overcast sky, was an opaque tube that must have been a hundred yards in diameter, and along it were passing charges of violet light. It was half-obscured in mist—perhaps the mist was some sort of exhaust or discharge—and this caused it to appear not quite real, only partially materialized from its actual setting. I knew, in the same way I had known all else, that the violet lights were men and women going off on journeys even more unimaginable than the one I had taken, traveling through the branching structure I had glimpsed back in the valley (the tube was merely a small visible section of the structure); and that the city was the place to which they returned once they accomplished their tasks. Knowing this did not alarm or perturb me, but the implication it bred—that we were still inside the thing that had snatched us from our old lives—was depressing. Understanding had become important to me, and I had believed I would eventually come to an understanding that would satisfy my need for it. Now it was clear that you were always in the midst of something too big to understand, be it god or cosmic animal or a circumstance that your mind rendered into a comprehensible simplicity … like a god or a cosmic animal. I would never be able to climb up top of any situation and say, "Oh, yeah! I got it!" For all I knew, we could be dead.

I heard a noise, saw Annie scaling the slope toward me. She gave me a hug and took in the view. "Well," she said. "I was right."

"I never doubted it."

She put an arm about my waist and squeezed. "You lie."

We stood looking across our new home, calm as house buyers checking out a property, and I was actually starting to think where it was we might settle—would it be better on the edge or downtown close to the tube?—when our three companions came to join us atop the rise. The Mexican couple glanced at Annie and me timidly. They stared impassively at the vista; the woman crossed herself. I was surprised that she retained the traditions of her faith after having traveled so far and learned so much. Maybe it was a reflex.

"English?" the bearded man asked, and Annie said, "American."

"I am Azerbaijani." He squinted at me and scowled. "You take my bullets?"

I admitted that I had.

"Very smart." He smiled, a clever, charming smile accompanied by an amused nod. "But rifle is broken. Bullets no good."

He gazed out at the city with its central strangeness of opacity and violet fire. I wanted to ask if he had ridden a black train to some Azerbaijani halfway house and how he had traveled the rest of the way, and what he thought was going on; but none of it was pressing, so I joined him in silent observance. Considering the five of us, the variance of our origins, I thought I was beginning to have a grasp of the mutability of the unknowable, of the complexity and contrariness of the creature god machine or universal dynamic that had snatched us up. And this led me to recognize that the knowable, even the most familiar articles of your life, could be turned on their sides, shifted, examined in new light and seen in relation to every other thing, and thus were possessed of a universality that made them, ultimately, unknowable. Annie would have scoffed at this, deemed all my speculation impractical woolgathering; but when I looked at the tube I reckoned it might be exactly the kind of thinking we would need wherever we were going.

The sun, or something like a sun, was trying to break through the clouds, shedding a nickel-colored glare. The Mexican woman peered at each of us, nodded toward the city, and said, "Nos vamos?" Annie said, "Yeah, let's go check this out." But the Azerbaijani man sighed and made a comment that in its simplicity and precision of vocal gesture seemed both to reprise my thoughts and to invest them with the pathos common to all those disoriented by the test of life.

"These places," he said musingly, then gave a slight, dry laugh as if dismissive of the concern that had inspired him to speak. "I don't know these places."