“He did? That is strange, isn’t it?”
“How do you see what he was talking about, Tibor?”
“Sort of the way you do,” Tibor said. “I don’t think I give a shit either.”
Then they heard the howl, ending in a brief, intense yelp and a very faint whine. Then nothing.
“Toby!” Tibor screamed, activating the battery-powered circuit and driving his cart in the direction of the cry. “Toby!”
Pete spun about, raced to catch up with him. The cart broke through a stand of bushes, pushed past the gnarled hulk of a tree.
“Toby . . .” he heard Tibor say, as the cart screeched to a halt. Then, “You — killed — him –”
“Any other response would not have been personally viable,” he heard Schuld’s voice reply. “I maintain a standard reactive posture of nullification against subhuman forms which transgress. It’s a common experience with me, this challenge. They detect my –”
Flailing, the extensor lashed out like a snapped cable and caught Schuld across the face. The man stumbled back catching hold of a tree. He drew himself erect then. His helmet had been knocked to the ground. Rolling, it had come to a halt beside the body of the dog, whose neck was twisted back at an unnatural angle. As Pete struggled to push his way through the brush, he saw that Schuld’s lip had opened again and blood fell from his mouth, running down his chin, dripping. The head wound he had mentioned was also visible now, and it too began to darken moistly. Pete froze at the sight, for it was ghastly in the half-shadows and the ever-moving light from the fire. Then he realized that Schuld was looking at him. In that moment, an absolute hatred filled him, and he breathed the words, “I know you!” involuntarily. Schuld smiled and nodded, as if waiting for something.
But then Tibor, who had also been watching, wailed, “Murderer!” and the extensor snapped forward once more, knocking Schuld to the ground.
“No, Tibor!” Pete screamed, the vision broken, “Stop!”
Schuld sprang to his feet, half of his face masked with blood, the more-human half wary now, wide-eyed and twisting toward fear. He turned and began to run.
The extensor snaked after, took a turn about his feet, tightened and lifted, sending him sprawling once more.
The cart creaked several feet forward and Pete raced about it.
By the time he reached the front, Schuld had risen to his knees, his face and breast a filthy, bloody abomination.
“No!” Pete shouted again, rushing to interpose himself between Tibor and his victim.
But the extensor was faster. It fell once more, knocking Schuld over backward.
Pete rushed to straddle the fallen man and raised his arms before Tibor.
“Don’t do it, Tibor!” he cried. “You’ll kill him! Do you hear me! You can’t do it! For the love of God, Tibor! He’s a man! Like you and me! It’s murder! Don’t –”
Pete had braced himself for the blow, but it did not come. Instead, the extensor plunged in from his left and the manual gripper seized hold of his forearm. The cart creaked and swayed at the strain, but Pete was raised into the air — three, four feet above the ground. Then, suddenly, the extensor moved like a cracking whip and he was hurled toward a clump of bushes. He heard Schuld’s moaning as he fell.
He was scratched and poked, but not severely jolted, as the shrubs collapsed to cushion him. He heard the cart creaking again. Then, for several moments, he was unable to move, tangled and enmeshed as he was. As he struggled to free himself, he heard a bubbly gasp, followed by a rasping, choking sound.
Tearing at the twigs and limblets, he was finally able to sit up and behold what Tibor had done.
The extensor was projected out and up, rigid now as a steel pole. Higher above the ground than Pete himself had dangled, hung Schuld, the gripper tight about his throat. His eyes and his tongue protruded. The veins in his forehead stood out like cords. Even as Pete stared, his limbs completed their Totentanz, fell slack, hung limp.
“No,” Pete said softly, realizing that it was already too late, that there was nothing at all that he could do.
Tibor, I pray that you never realize what you have done, he thought, raising his hand to cover his eyes, for he was unable to close them or move them. It was planned, Tibor, planned down to the last detail. Except for this. Except for this. . . It was me. Me that he wanted. Wanted to kill him. Him. At the last moment, the very last moment, he would have shouted. Shouted out to you, Tibor. Shouted, “Ecce! Ecce! Ecce!” And you would have known, you would have felt, you would have beheld, as he desired, planned, required, the necessary death, at my hands, of Carleton Lufteufel. Hanging there, now, all blood and dirt, with eyes that look straight out, forever, across the surface of the world — he wanted me to do that for him, to him, with you to bear witness, here and forever, here and in the great murch in Charlottesville, to bear witness to all the world of the transfiguration of a twisted, tormented being who desired both adoration and punishment, worship and death — here revealed, suddenly, as I slew him, here transfigured, instantly, for you, for all the world, at the moment of his death — the Deus Irae. And God! It could have happened that way! It could have. But you are blinded now with madness and with hate, my friend. May they take this vision with them when they go, I pray. May you never know what you have done. May you never. May you never. Amen.
SEVENTEEN
Rain … A gray world, a chill world: Idaho. Basque country. Sheep. Jai alai. A language they say the Devil himself could not master. . .
Pete trudged beside the creaking cart. Thank the Lord it was not difficult, he thought, to convince Tibor that Lufteufel’s place was nowhere near the spot Schuld had said it was. Two weeks. Two weeks, and Tibor is still hurting. He must never know how close he really was. He sees Schuld now as a madman. I wish that I could, too. The most difficult thing was the burial. I should have been able to say something, but I was as dumb as that girl with the broken doll in her lap we passed the next day, seated there at the crossroads. I should have managed some sort of prayer. After all, he was a man, he had an immortal soul. . . Empty, though, my mouth. My lips were stuck together. We go on. . . A necessary errand of fools. So long as Tibor can be made to feel that Lufteufel is still somewhere ahead, we must go on. Forever, if it comes to that, looking for a man who is already dead. It was Tiber’s fault, too, to think that God’s vision could indeed be captured, to believe that a mortal artist could daub an epiphany with his colors. It was wrong, it was presumption of the highest order. Yet. . . He needs me now more than ever, shaken as he is. We must go on. . . where? Only God knows. The destination is no longer important. I cannot leave him, and he cannot go back — He chuckled. “Empty-handed” was the wrong term.
“What’s funny?” Tibor said, up on the cart.
“Us.”
“Why?”
“We haven’t the sense to get out of the rain.”
Tibor snorted. Proper as he was, he commanded a somewhat better view than Pete.
“If that is all that concerns you, I see a building down the hill. It looks like part of a barn. We may be nearing a settlement. There seems to be something more in the distance.”
“Let’s head for the barn,” Pete said.
“We are already soaked. Can’t get any wetter.”
“This isn’t doing your cart any good.”
“That is true. All right. The barn.”
“A painter named Wyeth liked scenes like that,” Pete said when the shelter came into his view, hoping to route Tiber’s thoughts away from his brooding. “I saw some of his pictures in a book once.”
“Rainscapes?”
“No. Barns. Country stuff.”
“Was he good?”
“I think so.”
“Why?”
“His pictures looked exceptionally real.”
“Real in what way?”
“The way things actually look.”
Tibor laughed.
“Pete,” he said, “there are an infinite number of ways of showing how things actually look. They are all of them right, because they show it. Yet each artist goes about it differently. It is partly what you choose to emphasize and partly how you do it. It is plain that you have never painted.”
“True,” Pete said, ignoring the water running down his neck, pleased to have gotten Tibor talking on a subject that held more than a little of his attention. Then a peculiar thought struck him.