As if in a nightmare, they cut their way past chairs and tables, half-blinded by midges which rose like dust from the foliage and settled on their faces. The thicket grew worse. Whole clumps of ponic had collapsed under this self-imposed strain and were rotting in slimy clumps, on top of which more plants grew. A blight had settled in, a blue blight sticky to the touch, which soon made the party’s knives difficult to handle.
Sweating and gasping, Complain glanced at Wantage, who laboured beside him. The good side of the man’s face was so swollen that his eye hardly showed. His nose ran, and he was muttering to himself. Catching Complain’s eyes upon him, he began to curse monotonously.
Complain said nothing. He was too hot and worried.
They moved through a stippled wall of disease. The going was slow, but finally they broke through to the end of the room. Which end? They had lost all sense of direction. Marapper promptly sat down with his back to the smooth wall, settling heavily among the ponic seeds. He swabbed his brow exhaustedly.
‘I’ve gone far enough,’ he gasped.
‘Well, you can’t go any further,’ Complain snapped.
‘Don’t forget I didn’t suggest all this, Roy.’
Complain drew a deep breath. The air was foul; he had the nasty illusion that his lungs were coated with midges.
‘We’ve only got to work our way along the wall till we come to a door. It’s easier going here,’ he said. Then, despite his determination, he sank down beside the priest.
Wantage began to sneeze.
Each onslaught bent him double. The ruined side of his face was as swollen as the good one; his present distress completely hid his deformity. On his seventh sneeze, all the lights went out.
Instantly, Complain was on his feet, flashing his torch into Wantage’s face.
‘Stop that sneezing!’ he growled. ‘We must keep quiet.’
‘Turn your torch off!’ Fermour snapped.
They stood in indecisive silence, their hearts choking them. Standing in that heat was like standing in a jelly.
‘It could be just a coincidence,’ Marapper said uneasily. ‘I can remember sections of lights failing before.’
‘It’s Forwards — they’re after us!’ Complain whispered.
‘All we’ve got to do is work our way quietly along the wall to the nearest door,’ Fermour said, repeating Complain’s earlier words almost verbatim.
‘Quietly?’ Complain sneered. ‘They’d hear us at once. Best to stand still. Keep your dazers ready — they’re probably trying to creep up on us.’
So they stood there, sweating. Night was a hot breath about them, sampled inside a whale’s belly.
‘Give us the Litany, Priest,’ Wantage begged. His voice was shaking.
‘Not now, for gods ache,’ Fermour groaned.
‘The Litany! Give us the Litany!’ Wantage repeated.
They heard the priest flop down on to his knees. Wantage followed suit, wheezing in the thick gloom.
‘Get down, you two bastards!’ he hissed.
Marapper began monotonously on the General Belief. With an overpowering sense of futility, Complain thought, ‘Here we finish up in this dead end, and the priest prays; I don’t know why I ever mistook him for a man of action.’ He nursed the dazer, cocking an ear into the night, half-heartedly joining in the responses. Their voices rose and fell; by the end of it they all felt slightly better.
‘… and by so discharging our morbid impulses we may be freed from inner conflict,’ the priest intoned.
‘And live in psychosomatic purity,’ they repeated.
‘So that this unnatural life may be delivered down to Journey’s End.’
‘And sanity propagated,’ they replied.
‘And the ship brought home.’ The priest had the last word.
He crept round to each of them in the grubby dark, his confidence restored by his own performance, shaking their hands, wishing expansion to their egos. Complain pushed him roughly away.
‘Save that till we’re out of this predicament,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to work our way out of here. If we go quietly, we can hear anyone who approaches us.’
‘It’s no good, Roy,’ Marapper said. ‘We’re stuck here and I’m tired.’
‘Remember the power you were after?’
‘Let’s sit it out here!’ the priest begged. ‘The ponic’s too thick.’
‘What do you say, Fermour?’ Complain asked.
‘Listen!’
They listened, ears strained. The ponics creaked, relaxing without light, preparing to die. Midges pinged about their heads. Although vibrant with tiny noises, the air was almost unbreathable; the wall of diseased plants cut off the oxygen released by the healthy ones beyond.
With frightening suddenness, Wantage went mad. He flung himself on to Fermour, who cried out as he was bowled over. They were rolling about in the muck, struggling desperately. Soundlessly, Complain threw himself on to them. He felt Wantage’s wiry frame writhing on top of Fermour’s thick body; the latter was fighting to shake off the hands round his throat.
Complain wrenched Wantage away by the shoulders. Wantage threw a wild punch, missed, grabbed for his dazer. He brought it up, but Complain had his wrist. Twisting savagely, he forced Wantage slowly back and then hit out at his jaw. In the dark, the blow missed its target, striking Wantage’s chest instead. Wantage yelped and broke free, flailing his arms wildly about his body.
Again Complain had him. This time, his blow connected properly. Wantage went limp, tottered back into the ponics and fell heavily.
‘Thanks,’ Fermour said; it was all he could manage to say.
They had all been shouting. Now they were silent, again listening. Only the creak of the ponics, the noise that went with them all their lives, and continued when they had made the Long Journey.
Complain put out his hand and touched Fermour; he was shaking violently.
‘You should have used your dazer on the madman,’ Complain said.
‘He knocked it out of my hand,’ Fermour replied. ‘Now I’ve lost the bloody thing in the muck.’
He stooped down, feeling for it in a pulp of ponic stalks and miltex.
The priest was also stooping. He flashed a torch, which Complain at once knocked out of his hand. The priest found Wantage, who was groaning slightly, and got down on one knee beside him.
‘I’ve seen a good many go like this,’ Marapper whispered. ‘But the division between sanity and insanity was always narrow with poor Wantage. This is a case of what we priests term hyper-claustrophobia; I suppose we all have it in some degree. It causes a lot of deaths in the Greene tribe, although they aren’t all violent like this. Most of them just snap out like a torch.’ He clicked his fingers to demonstrate.
‘Never mind the case history, priest,’ Fermour said. ‘What in the name of sweet reason are we going to do with him?’
‘Leave him and clear out,’ Complain suggested.
‘You don’t see how interesting a case this is for me,’ said the priest reprovingly. ‘I’ve known Wantage since he was a small boy. Now he’s going to die, here in the darkness. It’s a wonderful, a humbling thing to look on a man’s life as a whole: the work of art’s completed, the composition’s rounded off. A man takes the Long Journey, but he leaves his history behind in the minds of other men.
‘When Wantage was born, his mother lived in the tangles of Deadways, an outcast from her own tribe. She had committed a double unfaith, and one of the men concerned went with her and hunted for her. She was a bad woman. He was killed hunting: she could not live in the tangle alone, so she sought refuge with us in Quarters.