“You see?” The Adder clome’s voice came from behind him. “Nothing to worry about. This could be anyplace. It doesn’t have to be the End Zone Hotel-that’s just a convenient metaphor we’ve decided to adopt. Just for you; a personal touch.”
The ragged carpet was in flames beneath McNihil’s feet. Smoke billowed up along his legs, swathing his abdomen and chest, its subtle rising force collecting under his chin. The hotel room was small enough that he could have spread his arms and put his hands flat against wallpaper writhing as though with fiery salamanders. An old-fashioned wooden bureau sagged and buckled as the flames leapt from drawer to drawer; the mirror hinged at the top looked like a bevel-edged slice of the sun’s heart, but only for a moment. The glass’s silver backing darkened and cracked, then shattered bomblike, mixing brighter slivers with the bits of broken window already scattered across the floor.
McNihil had raised one arm, the back of his hand shielding his eyes. Just as before, his flesh might as well have been altered to some redly translucent substance; he could see the room and its fire-lit, smoke-clotted contents as well or even better than if his eyes had been wide open. As an experiment, he took his forearm away from his face and reached out to the nearest wall, closing his fist upon the lapping flames. Rivulets of fire squeezed between his knuckles; McNihil felt the heat at the center of his palm, etching the lines written in the skin as though with a honed needle. The bloodless pain ran up his arm and burst inside his skull, the glare rendering him without sight for a moment. When he could see again, his hand was still clenched, undamaged and trembling, in the flames.
“Burns,” said the Adder clome, “but is not consumed.” He nodded toward McNihil’s fist against the wall. “That’s the territory you’re in. That’s the territory you’re part of-or at least your memories, the ones we gave you. And besides…” His smile showed, Cheshire-cat-like, through the smoke and quick tongues of flame that moved between him and McNihil. “It’s such a good metaphor, isn’t it? All dreams and memories are metaphors at last, mere functions of language. Even without words-they still just exist in your head, in one of those little silent rooms you keep the key to.”
“Metaphor…” McNihil drew his hand back from the burning wall and looked at it. The pain slowly ebbed from the soot-blackened flesh, as he let the intact fingers uncurl of their accord. “For what?” He pressed his hand flat against his shirt, leaving its dark imprint above his heart. He glanced over at the Adder clome. “What’s it supposed to stand for?”
“Come on. You know.” This time, the Adder clome spread his arms out in cruciform posture. The flames and smoke billowed across him, like the tide of a red ocean turned vertical. “This world, the one that you always called the Wedge-but it’s so much bigger than that. Bigger and older. Older than anything. What you thought was just the Wedge-some crummy bars and the places behind them, the rooms and streets where the prowlers hang out-you couldn’t see those places for what they really are.” The Adder clome’s voice tightened fervently. “Temples and doorways. Doorways into another world, this world. But you couldn’t see that. Because of the dark that you saw instead.” Slowly lowering his arms, the Adder clome shook his head, as though struck with futile regret. “It wasn’t just the darkness in your eyes, McNihil. It’s in everyone’s eyes. Everyone human, that is.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Unimpressed by the other’s language, McNihil rubbed the rest of the fire’s soot off against his trousers. “If we keep it dark, it’s because we like it that way. We don’t need to see some of this shit. That’s what we have prowlers for.” He realized where his own words were putting him: I’m defending them, thought McNihil. All of them, Harrisch and Travelt and all the rest. He didn’t care. Some part of him supposed that he had more in common-still-with the humans than with the others, the ones whose masks just looked that way. “Let the prowlers walk around here,” said McNihil with sudden vehemence. “It’s their place, not mine.”
“Not anymore.” A certain triumph sounded in the Adder clome’s voice. “You belong here now as much as they do. You’ve earned the right, pal. Enjoy it.”
“I’m just visiting. And even that’s under false pretenses.” McNihil had managed to rub enough of the black from his hand, that he could see again the lined flesh of his palm. “Right now, I’m really just looking for the exit door.”
“You don’t have that option,” the Adder clome sneered. “You came here to do a job-that’s what you said, remember?-and you can’t leave until it’s finished.” He reached out and gathered the lapel of McNihil’s jacket into his own tightly clenched fist. “There’s things you want to find out, aren’t there? Connect Harrisch and his connecting job. Let’s satisfy your curiosity, pal.” The Adder clome bent his arm, nearly pulling McNihil from his feet. “You might as well have the whole tour. Or at least as much of it as you can stand.”
The other’s sudden force took McNihil by surprise; dizzied, he felt the Adder clome swing him about in the hotel room’s close space, away from the smoke-outlined door and farther inside. This is his turf, McNihil realized, as the Adder clome knocked him back against the doorway leading to a minuscule bathroom. And payback time as well; this was what came from his own violence back at the clinic, when he’d been pressuring answers out of the other man.
“Take a look,” said the Adder clome, “and get an education.” He grasped both of McNihil’s lapels and yanked him away from the wall. The little dance inside the hotel room had brought the two of them up to the bed shoved into the corner by the broken window. “Tell me what you see, connector.”
McNihil caught his balance as the Adder clome let go of him. On a little bedside table, an antique-looking plastic radio melted and sagged in the fierce heat. The room’s flames had engulfed the bed itself, the sagging mattress transformed into a rectangular inferno, as though a trapdoor had been opened down into the earth’s molten core. Smoke, black and viscous, rolled a choking thundercloud past McNihil’s face, obliterating the ceiling above him. The heat scalded his eyes as he tried to discern the figure silhouetted in fire on the bed.
Something human, or close enough. And alive; the naked limbs slowly moved, writhing not in agony but in dreaming bliss. McNihil could just make out the profile of a woman’s face, masked unrecognizable as his own. Her eyes were closed, the eyelids trembling with the sight of whatever moved inside her private dreams; her mouth parted as though to draw deep inside her throat the flames’ kiss from the burning pillow. Almost a child, the fire sculpting her, luminous and fragile; the fingertips of one hand rested between her negligible breasts, as if she had gathered the bed’s ashy smoke to herself like black-petaled flowers.
Another piece of memory, a real one, linked up with the world in the hotel. He recognized the sleeping, dreaming figure on the bed. It’s her, thought McNihil. The cube bunny. She looked the way he’d seen in the wet reflection on the coffee percolator, back in the kitchen of his crummy apartment. That saddened him; for her to be here, something bad would’ve had to have happened to her in the world outside.
“Dreams within dreams,” said the Adder clome. He reached past McNihil and stroked the sleeping girl’s hair, brushing what might have been softer flames away from her ear. “And metaphors that don’t end.” The Adder clome turned his head, looking up to see what effect the show was having on McNihil. “How do you like this one?”