Sepia-toned flashback. On a cheap, portable television, a tearful woman is holding a press conference. She is organizing a task group for missing children, with plans to distribute flyers, put faces on milk cartons, etc. So that "no one will have to live through the nightmare [she] lived through." A calendar on the wall next to the television shows the year 1985.
The man in the wife-beater tee shirt, seen in previous flashbacks, leaves the cabin. The camera pans down below the level of the floor, and Deck's spirit drops through the floorboards into a crawlspace under the cabin. He phases through the outer wall and is soon running through the forest.
He meets the boy Holly. They play "Marco Polo" among the trees. Deck's physical similarity to Holly is very noticeable, although Deck is a couple of years older.
Deck hides in the entrance to a rocky ravine, shouting "Polo!" Holly hesitates. "I can't go in there," he whispers.
The two sit down next to each other on a fallen log. Deck puts his arm around Holly. "I just miss my mom so much," Holly says. "She'll be so upset if she finds out I fell and... hurt myself."
Deck thinks for a while. "Maybe she doesn't have to know," he says.
"What do you mean?"
"Tell me about your mom," Deck says. "Tell me all about your life. Tell me everything."
In the present day, in Our Lady of Fate Polio Ward, Agent Holland Lane leaned forward and said, "Tell me everything."
"I don't know everything," Cheryl Banning said, "But I'll tell you what I know. Bishop believes there's an 'underworld' beneath the... the skin of this one. It's the place where that fragment covered in hieroglyphics came from. He's trying to open up a gateway to that place, I think to bring something over from the other side.
"That's been the real goal of the pigment trade all this time. Yes, it's provided fodder for the spectres, but it's also produced pigment cults. Every time a cult forms, they start performing rituals, almost at random, as though they know they're supposed to do something, but they don't fully understand what it is. Bishop believed that eventually, one of the cults would hit on the correct ritual to bring over the thing that he's trying to get. I think that's what the Church of the Children of the Embracing Mother is doing now."
As the Agents pondered this, Terrence Greene suddenly spoke up. "I'm getting a message from Jen," he said. "She says to turn on the news."
On screen, a reporter was struggling to be heard over the sirens of dozens of police and emergency response vehicles: "...less than an hour ago that a bomb apparently went off here at Babbitt Plaza. Behind me you can see visible structural damage on the Twin Babbitt Towers, and we're getting reports that the roof of the mall underneath the towers has collapsed, trapping a number of people inside. Rescue efforts are already underway. Bomb squads and firefighters are investigating the source of the blast, but at present there seems to be no smoke or fire, just structural damage... FEMA response crews are reportedly on their way... there is some speculation that this is a terrorrist act. The congregation of the Church of the Children of the Embracing Mother were found dead at the scene, with no apparent injuries, and police are looking into a possible nerve gas attack....Elison Daley has been taken into federal custody and is known to be in stable condition..."
Meanwhile, Agent Li, who had been reconnoitering at Babbitt Plaza when the bomb struck, was trying to speak through Greene's radio. "There's spectres everywhere," she shouted, her voice peppered with static. '...and something... I can't describe this. You'd better--" her signal cut off.
The agents wasted no time deploying. Since Agent Li's body was occupying one of the only two projection creches, Agent MacMillian chose to go in-body, but took a dose of pigment with her, just in case. The rest projected. Agents MacMillian, McGee, Lane, and Herschler drove to Babbitt Plaza, while Agent Morrisson headed towards the federal courthouse in the hopes of finding where Elison Daley had been incarcerated.
The area around the Plaza had been cordoned off, but it was simple to slip through in all the confusion. On the spirit-plane, the air was filled with an oily, gritty dust that stung the projected Agents' skin and made seeing difficult. Spectres swooped through the sky above.
But the real spectacle were the Babbitt Plaza Towers. The two physical towers had been literally impaled by a third tower, made of black metal and visible only on the ghost-plane. The ghost tower was broken off at the base, and passed through both physical towers at an angle, like the crossbar of a crooked 'H'.
"Damn it," muttered Agent McGee. He had seen that tower before.
Agent Morrison discovered Elison Daley strapped to a gurney in a holding cell in the basement of the Federal Courthouse. The bandage over Daley's eyes was more than an inch thick; still, dime-sized spots of blood had soaked through the last layers of gauze.
Morrison masqued his voice to sound just like Bishop's, then proceeded to interrogate Daley. He learend that Daley had been in constant contact with an "angel." The angel, which referred to itself as "the Neverborn," had instructed him to organize the sit-in at Babbitt Plaza. The angel had promised that if Daley performed the ritual correctly, he would be shown the "City of Heaven," in its restored, uncorrupted state, as it was "before the Deluge." And allof this had been organized by Bishop himself, who had first introduced Daley to the angel.
But Daley thought something had gone wrong... he had done what the angel had told him, but now he could see nothing but blackness.
"I have an itch," he whimpered, "in the back of my throat. Please, Bishop, please release my arms."
Morrison pulled the heavy-duty velcro strap loose. Immediately, Daley jammed his fingers into his mouth and started digging out his tongue with his own fingernails. He began to choke and convulse. Outside, a guard started shouting for help, trying to open the door.
"Time to go," whispered Morrison, using Bishop's voice. "Remember Elison, tell no one we talked. You may be useful yet."
He ripcorded back to his body, which was in Tommy Fabrosi's van, a few blocks away from Babbitt Plaza.
Inside the the shopping center at the base of Babbitt Towers. A group of heavily armed and armored men had gathered around the elevator banks under the east tower. Several of them wore spirit goggles, and all of them carried automatic weapons. In the midst of the group, a pair of technicians made adjustments to a large, electronic device.
As the Agents watched from hiding, the technicians powered up the device. There was a loud humming noise, a shimmering — and six of the soldiers "phased" into the ghost-plane, as though they had been enshrouded. Immediately the ghost-soldiers began moving up the eastern stairway.
MacMillian, Herschler, Lane, and McGee raced up the western stairway. At the 19th floor, Herschler, Lane, and McGee were stopped by the outer iron wall of the ghost-tower, and were forced to back-track and climb up through the ceiling of the physical tower. While MacMillian — who could neither see nor sense the iron tower — stood watch, the other three worked their way around the tower's outer wall until they found a window through which they could enter.
They found themselves balancing on the wall of a spiral stairway that had been tilted 50° sideways. From "below," towards the eastern tower, they could hear the sounds of screams and gunfire, and over it, Agent Li's voice, calling for help. Herschler and Lane ran "downstairs," while McGee ran "up" to the fifth landing, where the Albino had taken him once before.
Morrison morphosed into a cloud of motes, nearly invisible among the ash and smoke blowing through the spirit realm around the towers. He utilized Dirge against the soldiers standing guard at the base of the east tower, then slipped past them in the ensuing distraction and panic and shot up the stairs to reach the iron tower.
Inside, he found himself in a sort of exhibition or museum gallery. Many of the artifacts had fallen off their displays and were piled against the wall at the "bottom" of the room. Agents Lane and Herschler in a pitched three-way battle between the enshrouded soldiers and a pack of spectres. Several of the spectres had piled onto Agent Lane; several more were tearing the soldiers to shreds; still more were gathered around a strange black gong. This last group were straining to pull away the iron brackets holding the gong fast to the steeply tilted floor. Agent Li was backed into a corner, trying to stay out of the crossfire.
Morrison tackled one of the spectres on Lane while Herschler lit into the spectres on the gong. Agent Lane, in desperation, invoked a powerful Dreamscape and powered it with Spite-energy. A sphere of blackness emerged from the center of Lane's forehead, floated into the air, and suddenly expanded, drenching the entire chamber and everyone in it in perfect, unbroken dark.
On the fifth landing, Agent McGee came upon the great robe and sickle that he had seen before. Hidden in the robe's folds was the key that the Albino had showed him.
As he freed it from its chain, a scraping, slithering sound drew his attention to a nearby doorway. A massive tangle of tentacles and rusty meathooks slid through the door and dropped into the room. McGee kept still, hiding in the folds of the robes, watching the creature feel its way across the floor. After a bit of blind exploration, it began to grope towards McGee's hiding place.
McGee activated Shadowland, a new and powerful variation on the Enshroud emanation. Instantly he became invisible and undetectable. The tentacle beast spasmed angrily at the sudden expenditure of vitality, but could not locate McGee as he slipped out the door and ran down to the tower's lower levels.
In the living realm, MacMillian, who had been hiding from a pair of soldiers performing reconnaisance on the 20th floor, decided she'd had enough of waiting. She injected herself with a dose of pigment she had brought along for just such an emergency, and entered the spirit realm.
She was surrounded by blackness and silence. She activated Beckon, driving back the darkness with her glow. With the darkness gone, all of the Agents — Lane, Morrison, Herschler, MacMikllian, and Li — found themselves alone in the tower's gallery room. The soldiers were gone, the spectres were gone... and the black gong was gone.
McGee appeared with the key in hand. Morrison snatched up a random artifacts — one of several masks that had fallen from their pedestals. The group exited the tower and made their way back to headquarters.
Back at the polio ward, they made one last unsettling discovery. Over the entrance to the polio ward was a chipped, faded mural, so familiar to the Agents by now that they hardly looked at it any more. It depicted the Virgin Mary, surrounded by a chorus of angels. And in the background, barely visible through the years-thick layer of grime, one of the angels was wearing a mask exactly like the one that Morrison had carried out of the tower.