Then at last, when the daylight had nearly faded, Farley called out: 'Bearer, kindly light the gas lamps. I have a great deal more to do.'
At this the assistant began to expostulate: 'But, sir, there is nothing here, you will see nothing, you are simply wasting your time, for no reason.'
Farley had been hoping and waiting for precisely such a moment. Now, raising his voice, he said: 'Hear me welclass="underline" I shall not leave this laboratory until I have seen the transformations that Laveran described. I am willing to stay here all night, if need be: I shall stay as long as I must.'
With that he lowered his head to the microscope once again. But in the meanwhile he had taken the precaution of placing the glass tumbler before him again, and now out of the corner of his eyes he saw the assistant snatching up a set of clean slides and slipping away to the anteroom.
Once he was gone, Farley made his way silently across the laboratory. Flattening himself against the wall, he crept towards the door until he had manoeuvred himself into a position where he could look into the anteroom without himself being detected.
Farley had steeled himself for anything, or so he thought, but he was unprepared for what he saw next. First the assistant went up to the woman, Mangala, still regally ensconced on her divan, and touched his forehead to her feet. Then in the manner of a courtier or acolyte he whispered some word of advice in her ear. She nodded in agreement and took the clean slides from him. Reaching for the birdcages she allowed her hand to rest upon each of the birds in turn, as though she were trying to ascertain something. Then she seemed to come to a decision; she reached into a cage, and took one of the shivering birds into her lap. She folded her hands over it and her mouth began to move as though muttering a prayer. Then suddenly a scalpel appeared in her right hand; she held the bird away from her and with a single flick of her wrist beheaded the dying pigeon. Once the flow of blood had lessened, she picked up the clean slides, smeared them across the severed neck, and handed them to the assistant.
Farley had the presence of mind to go hurrying across the room to his microscope. No sooner had he seated himself than the young man came in.
'Please examine these now, sir,' he said with a wide smile. 'Maybe you will at last achieve success in your quest.'
Farley turned the slides over his hand. 'But,' he said, 'these are not properly stained: the blood on them is still fresh.'
'Yes, sir,' said the assistant, offhandedly. 'Perhaps that which you are looking for can only be seen in freshly drawn blood.'
Farley placed the slide under the microscope and looked into the instrument. At first he saw nothing unusual; nothing that would have indicated to him, had he not known, that this exhibit came from a pigeon. He noticed the familiar granules of malarial pigment. But then suddenly he saw movement; under his eyes amoeboid forms began to squirm and move, undulating slowly across the glassy surface. Then all at once there was a flurry of movement and they began to disintegrate: it was then that he saw Laverari's rods appear, hundreds of them, tiny cylindrical things, with their pointed, penetrating heads piercing the bloody miasma.
The sweat began to drip off Farley's forehead now, as he watched the horned creatures burrowing, writhing, wriggling in frantic search. His breath grew laboured; his head began to spin. He sat up, gasping, the sight of these wilful, struggling creatures still vivid in his eyes. His gaze strayed to the window, and discovered a row of faces lined up against the glass, watching him, as he squirmed in his seat, mopping his brow. His eyes locked with Mangala's; she was standing in front of all the others, staring at him, smiling to herself. Clutched in her hand, in full view, was the body of the decapitated bird, the blood still oozing from its macabre wound.
'Tell him,' the woman said with a mocking smile, 'tell him that what he sees is the creature's member entering the body of its mate, doing what men and women must do… '
And here, at this point of revelation, which shows that Farley had already arrived at the conclusion that was to make his erstwhile team-mate famous, the narrative ends. For now, unable to contain himself any longer, Farley flung the slides at the woman and stalked quickly out of the laboratory.
But before franking the letter for the post, next morning, Farley added a few scribbled lines in the margin: 'In haste: much that I feared has been confirmed in these last hours. Shortly before matins, there was a knock on my door: it was Cunningham's young assistant. He told me – oh so many things – I shall write of them all to you in time. Suffice it to say for the present, that everything is other than what it appears to be, a phantom of itself. The young man has promised to reveal everything to me if I would but accompany him to his birthplace. Fortunately the place of which he spoke is not far from the location of my clinic. We are to leave tomorrow: I shall write again and in greater detail, dear friend, once I know more… '
But Elijah Farley never reached Barich: he disappeared during the journey, never to be seen again. The police discovered that he had indeed boarded the train at Sealdah, as scheduled, but had disembarked before his destination at a remote, rarely used station called Renupur, in severe monsoon weather. A guard was said to have reported later that a young man had been seen carrying his luggage.
Abruptly Ava began to beep: Rest indecipherable, unable to continue…
Chapter 22
MURUGAN could not get to sleep.
Sweltering under the mosquito net, he lay awake, watching the ceiling fan beat the heavy monsoon air, its stubby blades flashing hypnotically in the thin crack of light that was shining through the stubbornly unfastenable balcony door. The bedclothes had bunched up around his waist in moist, sweat-soaked clusters. Taking off his vest, he rolled it into a ball and dropped it out of the mosquito net. He was naked now, except for his cotton boxer shorts.
The generator was still pounding away at the wedding down the road. The music seemed even louder now. But somehow, despite all that noise, he could hear the mosquitoes clearly, droning patiently around the bed, testing for openings, gathering in excitement every time a hand or a foot brushed against the fabric. Soon he couldn't tell whether the buzz was inside the net or outside; whether the tingling in his limbs came from their interrupted probings or the chafing of the moist sheets.
He flattened himself against the mattress and tried to lie still. Spreadeagling his arms and legs he waited – waited to discover whether they were really inside the net; whether his inflamed skin would allow him to discern the feel of their bites.
It was strangely intimate to lie there like that, against damp cloth, spread out in that elementally open posture of invitation, of embrace, of longing. When he looked down at his body, lying flat on the bed, he could not tell whether he was waiting for them to show themselves to him, or whether he was showing himself to them: displaying himself in those minute detailed ways that only they were small enough to see, to understand, because only they had eyes that were designed to see not the whole but the parts, each in its uniqueness. Involuntarily he flexed his shoulders, arching his back, offering himself up, waiting to discover where they would touch him first, where he would first detect the tingling prick of their bites, on his chest or his belly, on the muscle of his forearm or the weathered codpiece of his elbow.
The fan became a blur; the mosquito net melted into a milky fog. He was floating outside it now, looking in, at people he knew, knew very well, even if only through books and papers. And now he was in again, inside the net; he was one of them too, lying on a hard hospital charpoy, stripped, naked, watching the English doctor uncork a test tube full of mosquitoes into his net. In his fist he still clutched the coins he had been given at the hospital gates. He held on to them tightly, savouring their feel, their reassurance; they were so cool to the touch, so hard edged; they made everything so simple, so clean: a handful of coins, a rupee, for handing on the thing that lived in his blood, for safekeeping, to the doctor.