He threw the bloody scissors clattering into the sink and fumbled through the bottles and cans in the cabinet until he found a spray bottle of lime-scented cologne. He doused the open wound again and again with the cool liquid, ignoring the pain that spread through his hand.
Extending his arm, he watched the red lines spreading, a delicate tracery of spreading poison. His fingertips had already gone numb but the pain that had been crawling up his arm eased. Panic began to recede and his heart stopped trying to hammer a hole in his sternum. He picked up the scissors and ran the blades under steaming hot water for a full minute. Then he sprayed the length of his forearm with the cologne, braced his left hand on the edge of the sink, pulled the tip of the belt tight with his teeth, and began to slice into the skin of his forearm, cutting a series of diagonal wounds across the thin red traceries, concentrating on nothing but the shining steel tip of the scissors as they carved a bright bloody path through his flesh. He flexed his fingers and cut too deep. A sudden leaping gout of red blood from a large vein sprayed itself across the sink and the bathroom mirror, a spouting burst that he could feel in his upper arm. He let the tip of the belt drop from his teeth, easing the tourniquet. Blood ran down his forearm in a widening river that glistened in the light like red satin.
He rested his forehead against the mirror and watched the blood swirling and roiling down the drain. Steam from the hot running water rose up and floated around him, reeking of copper and limes. A sudden cold sweat broke out across his cheeks, his neck, his back and shoulders. A vein in his neck started to pound slowly. A white light filled the bathroom and a great calm rose up from his chest and spread itself out across his upper body, rising like a flood into his mind. He felt his fear leaving him, replaced by a kind of blissful acceptance, a lack of caring.
His forehead began to slip down the mirror, leaving a streak of bright red as it moved through the blood spray on the glass. The sink below him looked like a pool filled with white light. It had a bright red center that looked like a setting sun. Comforting warmth and the scent of fresh limes rose up from it and he began to let himself fall gently downward.
“Christ, Micah! What the hell have you done to your arm?”
The voice was behind him, strong, deep, familiar. He jerked his head up, reeling as he did so, and saw Porter Naumann’s reflection in the mirror, standing behind him. Naumann’s mottled skin was pale blue. He was dressed, absurdly, in a pair of what looked to be emerald-green silk pajamas. His facial wounds had been sewn back together, badly, by someone with neither skill nor art, but it was still the old Naumann visage, piratical and wild.
His pajama top was open and Dalton could see that a vivid yellow-lipped scar ran down his naked body from the point of his chin to his flat belly, sewn shut with thick black thread. Dalton turned around and stared at Naumann, who grinned, showing bloodstained teeth in pale-gray gums.
“Why the hell were you hacking away at your arm like that?”
Dalton looked down at the slashes and cuts on his forearm.
“A spider… it bit me. Now the poison is spreading up—”
“And so you’re hacking your arm to ribbons? Where’d you get that notion? ‘Hints from Heloise’? Put some pressure on that.”
Dalton looked down at his arm. Blood was running off it and spattering onto the floor. The belt slipped off his arm and fell onto the tiles at their feet.
“Use the Kleenex,” said Naumann.
Dalton picked up a box of tissues from the toilet top, ripped off a wad of them, and pressed them into the wound. Naumann bent down, picked up Dalton’s leather belt, and handed it to him.
“Use this to tie it off.”
Dalton took the belt. He noticed that Naumann’s fingers had been swabbed clean. His strong hands looked as they had looked when he was alive, but of course the color was wrong. His feet were naked, the toes splayed and purple-looking. Naumann, for his part, gave Dalton a worried appraisal in return.
“Don’t you pass out on me, kid. Cinch up good and tight with that belt there, or you’ll pass out.”
Dalton tied off the tissue pack, twisted the belt tip in under the band, and jerked it in tight. Naumann shook his head.
“Not that tight. You’ll kill tissue. Back it off a bit.”
Dalton loosened the belt a notch. Underneath the wad of Kleenex the blood was welling up, but more slowly, seeping into the compress. Dalton swayed as he looked down at it, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Naumann was gone.
He sat down heavily on the toilet, shaking violently. At his feet the bathroom floor was covered in blood, smeared rectangles of bloody red tile. His suit pants were dappled with it and his shoes were stained almost black. The bathroom mirror looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. He leaned against the tank and let his head roll backward. The soft white light came back again, growing brighter, and his blood began to sing in his ears. His lids grew heavy again and he let them slowly close.
A brassy bellow from the other room snapped him upright, Naumann’s baritone vibrato, full of striding jovial life:
“Micah! Wake up. Where the hell’s your booze?”
He got to his feet, swayed, steadied himself on the tank, stepped around the blood pooling in squares across the tiled floor, and went back into the main room. Naumann was standing in front of the dresser. He had the top drawer pulled open and was riffling through Dalton’s shirts. He looked up when Dalton came into the room.
“The minibar’s empty, you drunken sot. You always have something in reserve.”
“I think I finished it all.”
Naumann waved that off with a sideways flick of his hand.
“Not you. How much have you had today, by the way?”
Dalton tried to give the question some thought while Naumann watched him. Was he really going to have a chat with this hallucination? Dalton decided that in reality he was passed out on the bathroom floor right now and that this was all a dream, the kind of out-of-body experience he had always heard about but never actually believed in.
What the hell.
When in Wonderland, talk to the Cheshire Cat.
“I started this morning. I believe I never stopped.”
Naumann leaned an elbow against the top of the dresser and shook his head slowly at Dalton. “Man, I have to tell you, Micah. You look like death.”
“I look like death? I look like death?”
Dalton sat heavily down on the bed, cradling his bloody left arm, and watched in a detached but vaguely appreciative way as Naumann went through the rest of the dresser drawers, rapidly and efficiently, as if he were tossing a crib for an entry unit.
Finding nothing, Naumann turned and pointed down to a place beside Dalton’s feet.
“How about your briefcase?”
Dalton reached under the bed and pulled out a travel-worn leather case with solid gold fittings. He threw it on the bed beside him. Naumann came over to the bed. He ran his hands over the top and then down the sides, stopping at the left-hand hinge plate. Sitting this close to him, Dalton caught an autopsy-room smell of disinfectant and dried blood coming off Naumann.
He managed to give every appearance of not being sickened by this. Naumann was an old friend and, although dead, deserved some consideration for what he had just been through.
Naumann found the release and pressed it and the case popped open. He stood up and shook his head slowly. “Same trigger you’ve always had. You should change it.”