“Why?”
“I didn’t see the trap he’d set. Didn’t see how he’d planned it all along, nurtured me like a son knowing that I’d be his executioner when the time came. I never realized-not once-that I was just his tool. He wanted to die. He wanted to pass his wisdom”-the word was pronounced derisively-“along to me, and then have me put an end to him.”
“Why did he want to die?”
“Don’t you see how terrible it is to live when everything around you perishes? And the more the years pass the more the. thought of death freezes your bowels, because the longer you avoid it the worse you imagine it must be? And you start to long-oh, how you long-for someone to take pity on you, someone to embrace you and share your terrors. And, at the end, someone to go into the dark with you.”
“And you chose Whitehead,” Marty said, almost beneath his breath, “the way you were chosen; by chance.”
“Everything is chance; and so nothing is,” the sleeping man pronounced; then laughed again, at his own expense, bitterly. “Yes, I chose him, with a game of cards. And then I made a bargain with him.”
“But he cheated you.”
Carys nodded her head, very slowly, her hand inscribing a circle on the air.
“Round and round,” she said. “Round and round.”
“What will you do now?”
“Find the pilgrim. Wherever he is, find him! Take him with me. I swear won’t let him escape me. I’ll take him, and show him.”
“Show him what?”
No answer came. In its place, she sighed, stretching a little, and moving her head from left to right and back again. With a shock of recognition Marty realized that he was still watching her repeat Mamoulian’s movements: that ail the time the European had been asleep, and now, his energies repleted, he was preparing to wake. He snapped his previous question out again, determined to have an answer to his last, vital inquiry.
“Show him what?”
“Hell,” Mamoulian said. “He cheated me! He squandered all my teachings, all my knowledge, threw it away for greed’s sake, for power’s sake, for the life of the body. Appetite! All gone for appetite. All my precious love, wasted!” Marty could hear, in his litany, the voice of the puritan-monk’s voice, perhaps?-the rage of a creature who wanted the world purer than it was and lived in torment because it saw only filth and flesh sweating to make more flesh, more filth. What hope of sanity in such a place? Except to find a soul to share the torment, a lover to hate the world with. Whitehead had been such a partner. And now Mamoulian was being true to his lover’s soul: wanting, at the end, to g0 into death with the only other creature he had ever trusted. “We’ll go to nothing . . .” he breathed, and the breath was a promise. “All of us, go to nothing. Down! Down!”
He was waking. There was no time left for further questions, however curious Marty was.
“Carys.”
“Down! Down!”
“Carys! Can you hear me? Come out of him! Quickly!”
Her head rolled on her neck.
“Carys!”
She grunted.
“Quickly!”
In Mamoulian’s head the patterns had begun again, as enchanting as ever. Spurts of light that would become pictures in a while, she knew. What would they be this time? Birds, flowers, trees in blossom. What a wonderland it was.
“Carys.”
The voice of someone she had once known was calling her from some very distant place. But so were the lights. They were resolving themselves even now. She waited, expectantly, but this time they weren’t memories that burst into view-
“Carys! Quickly!”
-they were the real world, appearing as the European opened his lids. Her body tensed. Marty reached for her hand, and seized it. She exhaled, slowly, the breath coming out as a thin whine between her teeth, and suddenly she was awake to her imminent danger. She flung her thought out of the European’s head and back across the miles to Kilburn. For an agonized instant she felt her will falter, and she was falling backward, back into his waiting head. Terrified, she gasped like a stranded fish while her mind fought for propulsion.