Only the piercing ivory pain that pitched him through the back of his neck to a point between his eyes, kept him from marvelling.
Abruptly, the pain cracked, shot down his spine, and cramped his bowels. There was a terrifying explosion, and the stoop of the stairs that he was settling towards banged apart and splintered across the vacant lobby like a broken vase. Henley slapped to the ground amid a patter of dislodged plaster and lay there stunned, trying not to faint.
His stomach muscles knotted again, and he was hoisted to his feet by a powerful surge of strength.
There was some movement down at the opposite end of the lobby, but he couldn't make sense out of it in the whistling deafness. Mechanically, his body turned, swung over the blasted stoop, and lumbered up the stairs. In his room, Henley collapsed.
On the floor, some sense of self-control returned. His head was throbbing, and there were trickles of dark, almost black blood dripping over his cheeks from the back of his head. With one finger, he felt the nape of his neck. There was a deep hole in it, too painful to probe. He swayed to his feet and leaned against the wall. People were scurrying up and down the hall.
Gradually, one thought cleared itself from the terror trilling through him. It was his cache. Despite the horror, he had to think about his stash. Quietly and quickly as possible, he shuffled over to the night table and sealed the cotton ditty bag with the heroin in it. He debated for a moment about flushing it down the toilet and getting himself to a hospital, but that idea was too closed. He felt trapped and terrified. There was the smell of something broken in the air, and he knew that he had to get away and think all of this through.
There was a fire escape outside his window, and he clambered down it to the street. Two cop cars had pulled up in front of the Elton, so he skipped down the alley and jumped a fence to Twenty-seventh Street. He was glistening with sweat and shaking ferociously. Whatever it was that had leaked out of the rock and attacked him, it had burrowed into his skull. He could feel part of it quavering at the mouth of the puncture wound it had made. It sickened him with despair, and he wanted to get help immediately, heroin or no, but he couldn't stop walking. His body marched on mechanically, sleepwalking. His eyes were glazed like small brown fruits, and those that saw him approaching gave way, widely.
The moon sang down around him, grim and cool, and he walked on and on, sticking to the darker cross streets. Finally, hours later, he stopped. He was on a tiny side street, virtually an alley, whose name he hadn't seen. A shopfront door with iron bratticing opened and an old, old man, skin grey and hackled as bark, urged him in. The old man leaned forward like a dead tree and studied him with eyes as bright as pins. Visions had made his face unearthly, scorched-looking, between the silver wires of hair. He wore a mantle sewn with seashells and porcupinequill scrollwork, and he stood still, hooded like a cobra, silent, beckoning Henley with a sway of his head to enter.
Henley stepped a pace into the shop, faltered a moment as he surveyed the place. One wall was covered with the wing-feather fan of an eagle. A stuffed monkey hung by its genitals from the ceiling, which was crusted with black mussel shells. The odour of the room was sticky. In a polished clawfoot burner with talons spread, an orange lump of olibanum squatted, and as Henley slowly pivoted to view the coils of a white python on one of the rafters, the hognose head watching him with dusty eyes, the old man lit the incense coals. The yellow vapours wafted over the rickety shelf, seethed over husks of seahorses, the moult of a tarantula, red-speckled seabird eggs, and amber and green bottles stoppered with the thumbs of apes.
The room was glimmering with the trills of canaries. The lizards that would eventually devour them drowsed below in cages crafted from twigs. A yellow and papery light, filtered through tall lanterns stained with images of serpents and squids, gave everything an umber cast. In that light the old man, who had closed the door and was now motioning Henley to sit, looked ageless.
Henley sat in the corner and watched anxiously as the old man approached, his trouser legs hissing.
He held a thin bone whistle to his lips and blew a brittle note. 'I been waitin' a long time for you.'
With a wombsoft tread, he stepped closer. 'Cthulhu fhtagn!' he spit, and Henley felt a surge of strength. The old man was wrapped in a cloak of shadow. 'You knaw nuthin' 'bout what has you.
Well, I got to say, dat is best.' He leaned far forward out of the shadows, and Henley saw that he had only one eye. The other had been replaced by a shard of mirror, and seeing his reflection in it, he grew faint. Henley's eyes were so widely dilated, there were no whites showing, and around the corners of his mouth a scaly blackness was crusted. 'You knaw nuthin'
'bout de way dat has you. And dat be good. Dat be best good.' He pulled the bone whistle to his parched mouth and sucked a sea chant, a modal hymn, through it that seemed to come from all around, like a sound heard underwater.
Listening to it, Henley felt both as if his life were a small animal dying in a bottle and as if he would live for ever in the open spaces of lone birds.
Ralf's head was going bad. There had been too many lousy breaks, and he was getting to feel threatened.
When he learned that Henley had signed out of St Vincent's, he went to a gunshop and got several extra clips for the Walther automatic. It was too heavy to stay in the city, so he drove out to his sister's place in Stony Brook. By the time he got there, Henley's message had come through, and Ralf wheeled back into New York. At the Elton the cops had left, but there were several people in the lobby, grouped together, mumbling, Nobody had any idea what had happened.
Henley's door was unlocked, and Ralf entered without knocking. Except for a squelchy odour in the air and several drops of dark blood on the floor, the place was vacant as a sucked egg. The lights were on, and the window was open. When he went over to check the fire escape, he spotted a small dull rock with curious etchings on it. Ralf at first thought it was a paperweight, but when he examined it more closely, he recognized that it was like nothing he had ever seen before. He pocketed it, searched the bathroom scrupulously, and left.
He rarely got drunk, but when he did he became so tight that only violence could unspool him. He went down to the Red Witch and got skunked enough to call his old field captain. The last time he had seen Vince Pantucci was in Can Tho when they were spreading a little lead around some of the villages, hoping to enrage the Cong. Shortly afterward, Ralf was caught smuggling M16’s out of the country.
Pantucci was the ring's honcho, but Ralf did two years in the clam without fingering him. Since then, Pantucci had completed his tour and walked. Ralf knew he was in the city. He had been hearing tales about him for over a year. The man was mean. He was the only person that Ralf knew who could really move weight - other than Gusto. And he wasn't talking to Gusto.
Getting in touch with Pantucci was difficult. He was big time now, and he stayed low. Eventually Ralf had to drop a few lines about gun running to make contact. An hour later, Pantucci stalked into the Red Witch. He was big, wide as an oven, with arms like dock ropes and tight brass-red curls that boiled up around his neck from under his silk shirt. His dark cave-sitter eyes spotted Ralf instantly, and he muscled into the booth where he was sitting, said, 'What's the take, clothead?'
'I need a favour.'
Pantucci rolled his eyes. He had the face of an Etruscan - ethereal cheekbones, high fat forehead, and skin the colour of baked earth pulled tight over his skull. 'What's it gonna be, monk?
Cash?''Look, captain...'
'The captain is looking, Ralf, and he don't like what he sees. You're strung out, ain't you?'
'Nah, cap. I'm clean, but I got caught sidewise in a sour deal.' 'Dope?' 'Yeah.'