“Do you really think that one’s your ticket on the last train west?” said a croaking voice from the waterline behind him.
Kerr glanced down and saw a six-foot-long lung-fish bobbing in the shallows. Its back and tail were three-quarters out of the water as it rested on its pectoral spikes, and breathed air. “Could be,” the baron answered. “If nothing is possible, then anything is possible.”
The lungfish chuckled, lowering its head and making a bubbling noise underwater that Kerr found most irritating. “You’ve got to be kidding,” the fish said. “How many times have you thought you had a way out of this place? A hundred? A thousand? Face facts, the pool is never going to let you go, Baron. You’re its A-Number-One Boy, forever.”
“What do you know?” Kerr snapped back. “A talking fish? You might not even exist. You might be just another hallucination.”
“Well, this hallucination is getting mighty hungry. How about tossing me some chow?”
Kerr walked over to the cart, picked up some of the pieces that had fallen on the ground and flung them as far out into the lake as he could.
“You could have just handed me one,” the lung-fish complained. Then, with a swish of its wide tail, it turned away from the shore and swam to join the feeding frenzy that had already begun.
The baron watched Red Coat continue to work on the remaining bodies, and to shoot him more of the evil looks. Despite the lungfish’s prediction of another failure, Kerr became more and more hopeful that the man with the red hair had the right stuff for a much more difficult job than quartering a torso, that he had both the homicidal tendencies and the unique brand of delusion necessary to end his own intolerable suffering.
Standing there, Kerr had a sudden, chilling realization. After killing him, Red Coat would most certainly throw him into the pool.
The baron had never considered the likely consequences of his being chopped up and fed to the fish. All he’d wanted was to be dead and gone. But now that he saw that dying might really be possible, it became clear to him that dying might not mean escape.
The lungfish were the intermediate processors, the predigesters of the pool’s food. Their guts broke the tissue and bone into a simpler form. What they excreted, and what drifted down, was what sustained the fungal entity that carpeted the bottom and sent fingers of itself worming down through the mountainside. If his life force was consumed by the pool, assimilated by it, Kerr realized he could still be part of it. Conscripted into the army of ghosts that swirled around him. If that was the case, the fish was right—he would never get away.
When the chopping and feeding were completed, the baron waved the crowd back down the trail to the ville. As they began to move, he cut overland, climbing over the fallen blocks of stone. Kerr had a goal in mind, if not an exact plan. He made for the edge of one of the deepest of the hillside’s potholes, a circular opening more than thirty feet across. When he reached his destination, he stopped, picked up a rock from the ground at his feet and dropped it into the hole. It took seven seconds for the stone to splash.
The blackness below him promised what he sought: true and eternal oblivion. If he stepped off the edge, there was no way his body could be recovered by Red Coat and turned into fish food. And even though the filaments of the pool probably decorated the walls of the yawning cavern, they couldn’t dine on his corpse. The tendrils had no feeding apparatus; they were the fungis’ fruiting bodies, whose only function was to produce bounty. And even if they did have a way of digesting things that he was unaware of, without the intercession of the lungfish, his body was in the wrong form for them to use.
Kerr stood on the edge, poised to end his life, but he didn’t take the fatal step.
He couldn’t take it. His legs wouldn’t move forward.
If stepping off into one of the potholes and chilling himself had actually been possible, Baron Kerr would have done it long, long ago. It was impossible because the pool would not allow him to injure himself. It kept him safe because it needed him.