Breer seemed to sense his intention. “You can’t hurt me,” he tried to say, the words coming out in a jumble. “I’m dead.”
Mamoulian shook his head. “Limb from limb,” he murmured. “If I must. Limb from limb.”
Chad grinned, hearing the European’s promise. Sweet Jesus, he thought, this was the way the world would end. A warren of rooms, cars on the freeway winding their last way home, the dead and almost dead exchanging blows by candlelight. The Reverend had been wrong. The Deluge wasn’t a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic. He watched, and thought of how he would describe this scene to the Reverend, and for the first time in his nineteen years his pretty head felt a spasm of pure joy.
Marty hadn’t realized how pleasurable the experience of travel had been a passenger of pure thought-until he plunged into Mamoulian’s body. He felt like a skinned man immersed in boiling oil. He thrashed, his essence screeching for an end to this Hell of another man’s physicality. But Carys was here. He had to keep that thought uppermost, a touchstone.
In this maelstrom his feelings for her had the purity of mathematics. Its equations-complex, but elegant in their proofs-offered a nicety that was like truth. He had to hold on to this recognition. If he once relinquished it he was lost.
Though without senses, he felt this new state struggling to impinge a vision of itself upon him. At the corners of his blind eyes lights flared perspective opened up and closed again in an instant-suns threatened to ignite overhead and were snuffed out before they could shed warmth or illumination. Some irritation possessed him: an itch of lunacy. Scratch me, it said, and you needn’t sweat anymore. He countered the seduction with thoughts of Carys.
Gone, the itch said, deeper than you’d dare to go. So much deeper.
What it claimed was perhaps true. He’d swallowed her whole, taken her down to wherever he kept his favorite things. To the place where the zero he’d tampered with at Caliban Street was sourced. Face-to-face with such a vacuum he would shrivel: there would be no reprieve this time. Such a place, the itch salad, such a terrible place. You want to see?
No.
Come on, look! Look and tremble! Look and cease! You wanted to know what he was, well you’re about to get a worm’s-eye view.
I’m not listening, Marty thought. He pressed on, and though-like Caliban Street-there was no up or down, no forward or back in this place, he had a sense of descent.. Was it just the metaphors he carried with him, that he pictured Hell as a pit? Or was he crawling through the European’s innards to the bowel where Carys was hidden?
Of course you’ll never get out, the itch said with a smile. Not once you get down there. There’s no way back. He’ll never shit you out. You’ll stay locked up in there, once and for all.
Carys got out, he reasoned.
She was in his head, the itch reminded him. She was flipping through his library. You’re buried in the dung-heap; and deep, oh, yes, my man, so deep.
No!
For certain.
No!
Mamoulian shook his head. It was full of strange aches; voices too. Or was that just the past chattering to him? Yes, the past. It had buzzed and gossiped in his ear more loudly in these recent weeks than ever in the preceding decades. Whenever his mind had idled, the gravity of history had claimed it, and he had been back in the monastery yard with the snow falling and the drummer-boy at his right-hand side quaking, and the parasites leaving the bodies as they cooled. Two hundred years of life had sprung from that conspiracy of moments. Had the shot that killed the executioner been delayed by mere seconds the sword would have fallen, his head would have rolled, and the centuries he’d lived would not have contained him; nor he they.
And why did this cycle of thoughts return now, as he looked at Anthony across the room? They were a thousand miles and seventeen decades from that event. I’m not in danger, he chided himself, so why quake? Breer was teetering on the edge of total collapse; dispatching him was a simple, if distasteful, task.