“For God’s sake, man! She may be occupied. It may be some time before I can speak with her. Put the blood in the chest. I’ll be back with the money as soon as I can.”
“Which girl is it?”
“Ludie.”
“The black bitch? Oh, she’ll have it to spare. Very popular, she is.” Myrie’s tone waxed conspiratorial, as if he were imparting secret knowledge. “I’m told she’s exceptional. Got a few extra muscles in her tra-la-la.” He leered at Rosacher, as if anticipating confirmation of this fact.
“Please!” said Rosacher. “The blood.”
Acting put upon, Myrie reached inside his coat and brought forth a veterinary syringe filled with golden fluid. He displayed it to Rosacher with an expression of exaggerated delight, as if showing a child a marvelous toy; then he opened the chest, set the syringe atop a block of ice, closed the lid and sat down upon it. “There now,” he said. “It’ll be safe ’til your return.”
Rosacher stared at him with loathing, wheeled about and made for his bedroom.
“Here! Where you going?” Myrie called.
“To fetch my boots!”
Rosacher proceeded into the bedroom and snatched his boots from beneath the bed. It galled him to beg money of Ludie. As he struggled to pull the left boot on, the disarray of his life, patched stockings, a raveled vest, a shabby cloak, all his ill-used possessions seemed to be commenting on the paucity of his existence. A flood of cold resolve snuffed out his sense of humiliation. That he should allow the likes of Myrie to practice extortion! That he should be delayed an instant in beginning his study of the blood! It was intolerable. He flung down the boots and strode back into the sitting room, each step reinvigorating his anger. Myrie shot him a quizzical glance and appeared on the verge of speaking, but before he could utter a word Rosacher seized him by the collar, yanked him upright and slung him headfirst into the wall. The little man crumpled, giving forth a sodden sound. Once again Rosacher grabbed his collar and this time slammed his face into the floorboards. Spitting curses, he rolled Myrie onto his back, lifted him to his feet and threw him against the door. He barred an arm beneath his chin, pinning him there while he groped for the door knob. Blood from his nose filmed over Myrie’s mouth. A pink bubble swelled between his lips and popped. Rosacher wrenched open the door and shoved him out into the corridor, where he collapsed. He intended to hurl a final curse, but he trembled with rage and his thoughts would not cohere. He stood watching Myrie struggle to his hands and knees, deriving a primitive satisfaction from the sight, yet at the same time dismayed by his loss of control. Merited, he told himself, though it had been. Unable to develop an appropriate insult, he kicked Myrie’s hat after him and closed the door.
2
Hematology had been Rosacher’s speciality in medical school, but the poetic character of blood, that red whisper of life twisting through caverns in the flesh, had intrigued him long before he entered university. And so it was a natural evolution that his scholarly concerns conjoin with his fascination regarding the dragon to create an obsession with Griaule’s blood. It astonished him that no one else had thought to study it. Blood pumped by a heart that beat once every thousand years, never congealing, maintaining its liquidity against inexorable physical logic…the potential benefits arising from such a study were unimaginable. Yet now, peering at the slide he had made, what he saw bore so marginal a relation to human blood, he wondered whether a study would prove rewarding. To begin with, the blood had no recognizable cells. It abounded with microscopic structures, darkly figured against the golden plasma, but these structures multiplied and changed in shape and character, rapidly passing through a succession of changes prior to vanishing—after more than an hour of observation, Rosacher had begun to believe that Griaule’s blood was a medium that contained every possible shape, each one busy changing into every other. He grew fatigued, but rubbed his eyes and splashed water onto his face and kept on peering through the microscope, hoping a dominant pattern would emerge. When none did he was tempted to accept that the blood was magical stuff, impervious to informed scrutiny; yet he was unwilling to let go of obsession, seduced by the infinity of pattern disclosed by the slide, the mutable contours of the mysterious structures, the shifting mosaic of gold and shadowy detail, pulsing as if they reflected the process of an embedded rhythmic force, as if the blood were its own engine and required no heartbeat to sustain its vitality. And such might be the case. No other explanation suited. The matter at issue, then, would be to illuminate the workings of this engine, to discover if its function could be replicated in human blood. He considered going for a walk. Physical activity would allow his excited thoughts to settle and he might then be able to construct an empirical strategy; but he could not pull himself away from the microscope, captivated by the protean beauty of the design unfolding before him, one moment having the smudged delicacy of a rubbing and the next becoming sharply etched against the golden background.
It was apparent that Griaule’s blood contained an agent that was proof against degradation, against the processes of time. Whether this was due to its intrinsic nature or to the enchantment that had rendered the dragon immobile, Rosacher could not speculate; but it occurred to him that the mutable constituency of the blood, the evolution of its patterns, might reflect an ongoing adjustment to the flow of time through matter, an adjustment that prevented it from decaying. This insight seemed not to arise from a process of deduction but from the blood itself, to be basic information carried by its patterns, information that he had absorbed by observing its changes—though to accept such an outrageous proposition was not in his character, Rosacher found he could not reject it. With acceptance came the recognition that the blood might offer not merely an anti-clotting agent, but a remedy to the depredations of time itself and thus to every ill associated with aging. So entranced was he by the flickering mosaic on the slide, he scarcely registered Ludie’s knock.
“Richard?” she called. “Are you there?”
Impatiently, he threw open the door. She wore a petticoat and a frilled bodice, and her kittenish, cocoa-colored face was troubled. He was about to tell her to come back later, when she was pushed aside by a gaunt lantern-jawed man. He towered over Myrie, who peeked from behind him, and was dressed in much the same manner: greatcoat, mud-caked boots, and a slouch hat. His acromegalic features were split by a grotesque smile, brown teeth leaning at rustic angles in the inflamed gums.
“Hello!” he said cheerfully, and clubbed Rosacher in the temple with his fist.
When Rosacher had regained sufficient of his senses to be aware of his surroundings, he discovered that he was trussed hand and foot, and lying on the floor. Ludie huddled beside him and two men—Myrie and the man who had struck him—were ransacking the room, tossing papers and books about, emptying shelves, knocking over his microscope. This abuse caused Rosacher to complain feebly, attracting the notice of the big man. He dropped to a knee beside Rosacher, grabbed him by the shirtfront and lifted him so their noses were inches apart. To Rosacher, dazed, his skull throbbing, that leathery face was an abstract of mottling, moles, and crevices, dominated by two mismatched eyes, one brown, one green—a barren terrain in which two oddly discolored puddles had formed.
“Where’s your money?” the man asked, his rotten breath gushing forth, as from the sudden opening of a stable door.
Rosacher had no thought of lying—he indicated his jacket, which lay across the back of a chair, and watched with muddled despair as the man rifled his wallet. Beside him, Ludie made an affrighted noise.