He slid from the table and plunged toward the door. A small man with a wooden look on his face hopped up onto one of the show platforms and dived at the sick-looking man with the long red hair. A woman screeched and raced at the red-haired man. Dake felt a surge of terror so strong that he knew, somehow, that it had been induced in his brain by Karen to give him more speed, more energy.
The red-haired man was twisting in a knot of people who oddly fell away from him, as though all interest in him were suddenly lost. Dake burst through the door and found himself running with others. Running with a pack of others. And he saw that they were all himself. He saw a dozen Dake Lorins bursting from the door, running in all directions, and he screamed as he ran, screamed and looked back over his shoulder as he screamed, saw the red-haired one stand on the sidewalk and then topple as someone dived against his legs. He ran silently then, lifting his long legs, running until white pain burned his side and scorched his lungs. He slowed and walked, struggling for breath, his knees fluttering, sweat cold on his body.
The cabdriver was reluctant. He said he didn’t make trips like that. He yielded to two arguments — Dake’s strangling arm across his throat and the thousand-rupee note in front of his eyes. Dake took the man’s gun and shoved it inside his belt. Dawn wasn’t far away as they turned into the only tunnel to Manhattan that had not become flooded and unusable through neglect. In the city the white police trucks were collecting the bodies of those who had died violently in the night. Dake felt caked and dull and old, worn dry with emotional hangover. They went through the dark streets in those predawn hours when life is at its lowest ebb — the hours of aimless regrets, of the sense of waste, of the knowledge of death. The October stars wheeled in a corrosive indifference to all the works of man. The city slept... restlessly.
Ten
Mindful of Karen’s last warning, he had the driver stop two blocks from the above-ground lobby of the apartment dwelling where Miguel lived. He gave the man the thousand-rupee note, returned his gun. The man gave him a surly nod, made a screeching U-turn, reckless of his precious tires, drive back downtown, single red eye blinking as the rough road surface joggled a loose connection.
Dake moved with instinctive animal caution, staying on the darker side of the street, stepping lightly and quickly through patches of faint radiance. The above-ground lobby was lighted. He could see the head of the desk clerk bent over a book on the high desk. The soft light of the lobby made a semicircle of radiance that reached almost to the midpoint of the road.
Dake waited for a time in the shadows, oddly restless, and then walked out boldly, heading directly across the street for the doors. His heels were loud on the asphalt. He heard a faint scuffing noise in the shadows behind him and to his left. He did not turn, but lengthened his stride. The area of light was two steps away. He took another long stride and was caught there, motionless. Something had clamped down on volition, something that held him as though, in an instant, he had been turned to ice, or stone. He could not change even the direction of his sight. The clerk was just off his center of vision. He saw the head lift abruptly. He moved then, taking a long step backward with infinite unwilled stealth. Another step.
Miguel Larner appeared suddenly, just inside the doors. Dake had not seen where he had come from, or how. The man wore a pair of florid pajamas. He stood very still. A stranger appeared behind him, another beside him, and a tall woman appeared over near the desk. The five persons inside the bright lobby stood and watched him. They were fifty feet away. He could see no expression on their faces, but their eyes seemed bright, feral. He was aware of how alien they were. They emanated a tangible coldness.
Something behind him was frightened. He could taste fright that nibbled at the edges of his mind. A hard compression of force erupted into his brain. It sucked him forward, running with a vast awkwardness, a shamble-legged, slack-armed lunge that took him stumbling across the sidewalk, diving for the doors that flicked open barely in time, to let him slide and roll on the slick floor, to thud against the base of the desk as the woman stepped lightly out of the way. He sat up. They had all moved closer to the door. They filed out and stood in a row on the sidewalk. On the far side of the street something flounced and rolled and made guttural sounds in the darkness. They all came back in. Miguel Larner came over to Dake. His eyes were vast and hung in pure velvet blackness, unsupported. There was nothing else in the world but the eyes of Miguel Larner. Little fingers pried under the edge of Dake’s soul and flipped him. He fell off the edge into blackness.
It was a cloudless spring morning by Miguel’s dioramic pool. Dake shut his eyes again. He remembered a time long ago. Eight years old. He had seen the overhead lights of the operating room. Then heard a hollow echoing voice in his head, saying, as though in a long tunnel, “mmmm-gas! mmmmm-gas! mmmmm-GAS!”
And then the bleary awakening — the over-large faces of his parents looking down at him on the bed — big faces suspended at odd angles. “How do you feel?” A voice that echoed down a long empty tunnel.
He opened his eyes again. He was on a gay beach chair by the pool. Miguel and a stranger looked at him with that cold sobriety, that extra-human speculation he had seen in the lobby — how long ago? A year, or a minute.
Miguel’s lips moved. “Mr. Lorin. Mr. Merman.”
“How do you do.” Dake wanted to let loose crazy laughter at the quaintness of the formality. He trapped the laughter in his throat.
Merman had a boy’s face, an old man’s eyes.
“You did well,” Miguel said, “to get in range of Johnny. Otherwise Karen’s rather pathetic little exhibition of stubbornness would have been quite pointless. They’ve brought her in. She wants to see you. I’ll call her. Don’t speak to her.”
No answer seemed necessary. Miguel gave Merman a quick sharp look and nodded. Dake had the idea they were communicating with each other. Karen came out to the pool, stood on the apron at the far side of the pool and looked at Dake. He was shocked at the change in her. Her face was wan and pinched, and her eyes were enormous. Her mouth had a trembling, old-lady uncertainty about it, and her fingers plucked at the edges of her grubby skirt. Two things seemed mingled inextricably in her eyes. A keen, warm, personal interest in him, and also a look of confused dullness — the look sometimes seen in the eyes of a dog beaten once too often.
Miguel nodded at her and she turned and left, walking aimlessly, shaking her head, saying something to herself that Dake could not understand.
“What happened to her?” Dake asked.
“I’ll tell you, but just remember it, don’t try to understand it. Later... if you are more than I think you are, understanding will catch up with you. Remember this. Two screens badly torn. The third screen bruised. She’ll be a long time healing, relearning, readjusting. She’ll be a long time here, Dake Lorin.”
“What is this all about?” Dake asked. He had a sense of futility as he asked the question. Miguel Larner went over to the pool, sat and dangled his legs in the water, his bare brown back toward Dake. Dake looked toward the young-old face of Merman. His eyes veered suddenly toward something that had moved on the stones of the terrace. A tiny column of little naked savage figures snake-danced their way toward his ankles. Four-inch figures with animal faces. Their tiny cries were like the cries of insects. He instinctively snatched his feet up into the chair. They swarmed up the chair legs.