Which was good.
Which was very good.
If the anger the baron had witnessed was real, and not some figment of his own imagination, it was also a first. The spores and the bounty had always produced slaves who were compliant. Not demanding.
Not impatient. And above all, not envious. They would take up the pipe and wield it joyfully when the time came, but only when ordered to do so.
The black man had only battled to keep the pipe because the pool entity, speaking through Kerr, had commanded him to use it.
Assuming that the pool had absolute control of Red Coat, a safe assumption under the circumstances, it was making him behave differently than anyone else ever had, allowing him an element of personality that it had refused all the others. Whatever his hallucinations were, they, too, had to be markedly different than anyone else’s.
The baron kept his eye on Red Coat as he led his flock and the corpse cart up the zigzag trail to the pool. He noticed when the red-haired man paused and looked back at the ville. The expression on the newcomer’s face was one of desire, of greed, even.
What was he seeing down there? Kerr asked himself. Or, more properly, what was the pool making him see? It had a way of finding the weakest point in a human being’s psychology, and attacking it. How it did this was a mystery. As far as the baron could tell, the pool wasn’t capable of thought; it just did the things it did.
It was.
As Kerr moved up the grade, he swam in a sea of the dead. Vague floating specters surrounded him, drifted through him, over his head. These were the innumerable ghosts of the pool; he could see them through closed eyelids. He couldn’t match names with faces, but every one of them had drawn his or her final breath in the Clobbering Chair. Every one bore the mark of the iron pipe on their skull.
Although the baron’s world and this spectral world of the pool’s victims overlapped visually—he could see them, but they could not see him—they didn’t overlap tangibly. There was no sensation of contact as the gauzy forms passed through or brushed against him. Kerr had become so used to the horrors of these hallucinations that they had become nothing more than an annoyance. Especially when the sun was going down. The angled, softened light made it difficult to see through the randomly shifting apparitions.
Though the pool could be subtle in its manipulations, it wasn’t in this case. His visions of the legions of dead were meant to demonstrate how close the ones who had gone before were, how close freedom was, and yet always just beyond his reach. It was a constant, minute-by-minute reminder that he who wanted more than anything to escape could not. Once Kerr had had a life, though he could barely remember it. Once he had had faith, though that was dead to him. The pool had taken everything. It had taken his soul.
When the procession reached its denuded bank, the pool was quiet. It reflected the peach and turquoise of the sunset, and the black fringe of the trees along the ridgeline above.
The flock looked to Baron Kerr for further instructions.
“The body is never alone,” he told them. “It has gathered and keeps a web of creatures around it. A family connected by the chain of life. Each member of the family performs a different task, or set of tasks, all to insure the body’s health and well-being. And the body, in return, insures the health and well-being of all its family members.”
He pointed at the tools in the cart and the corpses under them. “As loyal members of that family, we have one more job to perform. The dead must be cut up in small pieces, so the fish in the pool can eat them.”
Several of the newcomers grabbed the implements and immediately set to hacking up the corpses into chunks. Red Coat showed a particular zeal for the task, and he kept looking up from the gruesome work, wiping the spattered blood from his face with his coat cuff, and shooting Kerr a look of absolute hatred.