Deus Irae (22 page)

Ahead, he could make out the forms of Schuld and Tibor in the firelight. They were laughing, they seemed to be happy and that should be good. He felt something brush against his leg. Looking down, he saw that it was Toby. He reached out to pat the upturned head.

  Alice held the doll, crooning to it, swaying. She rocked back and forth from one foot to the other. The corridor slanted gently before her. Squatting, she placed the doll on the truck. With a small push, she started it on its journey down the tunnel. She laughed as it sped away. When it struck the wall and turned over, she screamed.

“No! No! No! No!”

Running to it, she raised the doll and held it.

“No,” she said. “Be all right.”

She set the truck upright, reinstalled the doll.

“Now!” she said, pushing it again.

Her laughter followed it as it spun on its way, avoiding the obstacles which had collected in the corridor until it came to a crate filled with plastic tiles. When it struck there, the doll was hurled several feet and its head came off, to continue bouncing on down along the hall.

“No! No!”

Panting, she snatched up the body and pursued the head.

“Be all right,” she said when she had retrieved it. “Be all right.”

But she could not get the head to go back on again. Clutching them together, she ran to the room with the closed door and opened it.

“Daddy!” she said. “Daddy! Daddy fix!”

The room was empty, dim, disorderly. She climbed up onto the unmade bed, seating herself in its middle.

“Gone away,” she said, cradling the doll in her lap. “Be all right. Please be all right.”

She held the head in place and watched it through moist prisms which formed without sobs. The rest of the room came to seem so much darker.

  The cow dozed, head depressed, beside the tree where she was tethered. In his cart, Tibor ruminated: Where then is the elation? My dream, the substance of my masterpiece, my life’s work—is almost within reach. It would have been so much more joyous a thing had He not appeared to me and done the things that He did. Now that I am assured the chance to frame Him in my art, the landscape of my joy divides and leaves me, not so dark as a silent house, but so confused, with my life gigantic, ripening to the point of bursting, with fear and ambition the last things left. To change it all to stone and stars—yes, I must try. Only, only now, it will be harder than I thought it would. That I still have that strength, that I still have it …

“Pete,” he said, as the other came into the camp, Toby at his heels, tail a-wag. “How was your walk?”

“Pleasant,” Pete said. “It’s a nice night.”

“I think there is a little wine left,” Schuld said. “Why don’t we all have a drink and finish it off?”

“All right. Let’s.”

He passed the bottle among them.

“The last of the wine,” he said, disposing of the empty flask over his shoulder and into the trees. “No bread left either. How long till the day when the last of you must say that, Pete? Whatever made you choose the career that you did, times being what they are?”

Pete shrugged.

“Hard to say. Obviously, it wasn’t a matter of popularity. Why does anyone choose anything and let it dominate his life? Looking for some sort of truth, I suppose, some form of beauty …”

“Don’t forget goodness,” Schuld said.

“That, too.”

“I see. Aquinas cleaned up the Greeks for you, so Plato is okay. Hell, you even baptized Aristotle’s bones, for that matter, once you found a use for his thoughts. Take away the Greek logicians and the Jewish mystics and you wouldn’t have much left.”

“We count the Passion and the Resurrection for something,” Pete said.

“Okay. I left out the Oriental mystery religions. And for that matter, the Crusades, the holy wars, the Inquisition.”

“You’ve made your point,” Pete said. “I am weary of these things and have trouble enough with the way my own mind works. You want to argue, join a debating team.”

Schuld laughed.

“Yes, you are right. No offense meant, I assure you. I know your religion has troubles enough on the inside. No sense to dredging after more.”

“What do you mean?”

“To quote a great mathematician, Eric Bell, ‘All creeds tend to split into two, each of which in turn splits into two more, and so on, until after a certain finite number of generations (which can be easily calculated by logarithms) there are fewer human beings in any given region, no matter how large, than there are creeds, and further attenuations of the original dogma embodied in the first creed dilute it to a transparent gas too subtle to sustain faith in any human being, no matter how small.’ In other words, you are falling apart on your own. Every little settlement across the land has its own version of the faith.”

Pete brightened.

“If that is truly a natural law,” he said, “then it applies across the board. The SOWs will suffer its effects just as we do. Only we have a tradition born of two thousand years’ experience in weathering its operation. I find that encouraging.”

“But supposing,” Schuld said, “just supposing—what if the SOWs are right and you are wrong? What if there is really a divine influence acting to suspend this law for them? What then?”

Pete bowed his head, raised it, and smiled again.

“It is as the Arabs say, ‘If it is the will of God it comes to pass.’”

“Allah,” Schuld corrected.

“What’s in a name? They differ from country to country.”

“That is true. And from generation to generation. For that matter, given one more generation, everything may be different. Even the substance.”

“Possibly,” Pete said, rising to his feet. “Possibly. You have just reminded me that my bladder is brimming. Excuse me.”

As Pete headed off into the bushes, Tibor said, “Perhaps it was better not to antagonize him so. After all, it may just make him more difficult to deal with when the time comes to distract him or mislead him or whatever you have in mind for when we find Lufteufel.”

“I know what I am doing,” Schuld said. “I want to demonstrate how tenuous, how misguided, a thing it is that he represents.”

“I already know that you know more about religion than he does,” Tibor said, “being head of your whole church and all, and him just a trainee. You don’t have to show me that. I’d just as soon the rest of the trip went pleasantly and that we were all friends.”

Schuld laughed.

“Just wait and watch,” he said. “You will see that everything turns out properly.”

This is not at all the way that I envisaged this Pilg, Tibor thought. I wish that I could have done it alone, found Lufteufel by myself, taken his likeness without fuss or bother, gone back to Charlottesville and finished my work. That is all. I have a great aversion to disputes of any kind. Now this, here, with them. I don’t want to take sides. My feelings are with Pete, though. He didn’t start it. I don’t want a lesson in theology at his expense. I wish that it would just stop.

Pete returned.

“Getting a bit nippy,” he said, stooping to toss more sticks onto the fire.

“It is just you,” Schuld said, “feeling the outer darkness pressing in upon you, finally.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Pete said, straightening. “If you’re so damn gone on that dippy religion, why don’t you join it? Go bow down before the civil servant who gave the order that screwed things up! Model plaster busts of him from Tibor’s murch! Play bingo at his feet! Hold raffles and Day of Wrath benefit picnics, too, while you’re at it! You’ve still got a lot to learn, and that will all come later. But in the meantime, I just plain don’t give a shit!”

Schuld roared with laughter.

“Very good, Pete! Very good!” he said. “I’m glad the rigor
mortis has left your tongue intact. And you’ve reminded me of something I must go do now myself.”

Schuld trudged off into the bushes, still chuckling.

“Damn that man!” Pete said. It is hard to keep recalling that he saved my life and that love is the name of the game. What has gotten into him that he is becoming my cross for today? That air-cooled, fuel-injection system with its absolutely balanced compression and exhaust cycle now seems aimed at running me down, backing over the remains to make it a perfect squash and leaving me there as flat and decorative as Tibor’s murch. I am just going to refuse to talk to him if he starts in again.

“Why did he get that way all of a sudden?” Pete said, half to himself.

“I think that he has something against Christianity,” Tibor said.

“I never would have guessed. Funny, though. He told me religion doesn’t mean much to him.”

“He did? That is strange, isn’t it?”

“How do you see what he was talking about, Tibor?”

“Sort of the way you do,” Tibor said. “I don’t think I give a shit either.”

Then they heard the howl, ending in a brief, intense yelp and a very faint whine. Then nothing.

“Toby!” Tibor screamed, activating the battery-powered circuit and driving his cart in the direction of the cry. “Toby!”

Pete spun about, raced to catch up with him. The cart broke through a stand of bushes, pushed past the gnarled hulk of a tree.

“Toby …” he heard Tibor say, as the cart screeched to a halt. Then, “You-Med-him—”

“Any other response would not have been personally viable,” he heard Schuld’s voice reply. “I maintain a standard reactive posture of nullification against subhuman forms which transgress. It’s a common experience with me, this challenge. They detect my—”

Flailing, the extensor lashed out like a snapped cable and caught Schuld across the face. The man stumbled back, catching hold of a tree. He drew himself erect then. His helmet had been knocked to the ground. Rolling, it had come to a halt beside the
body of the dog, whose neck was twisted back at an unnatural angle. As Pete struggled to push his way through the brush, he saw that Schuld’s lip had opened again and blood fell from his mouth, running down his chin, dripping. The head wound he had mentioned was also visible now, and it too began to darken moistly. Pete froze at the sight, for it was ghastly in the half-shadows and the ever-moving light from the fire. Then he realized that Schuld was looking at him. In that moment, an absolute hatred filled him, and he breathed the words, “I know you!” involuntarily. Schuld smiled and nodded, as if waiting for something.

But then Tibor, who had also been watching, wailed, “Murderer!” and the extensor snapped forward once more, knocking Schuld to the ground.

“No, Tibor!” Pete screamed, the vision broken. “Stop!”

Schuld sprang to his feet, half of his face masked with blood, the more-human half wary now, wide-eyed and twisting toward fear. He turned and began to run.

The extensor snaked after, took a turn about his feet, tightened and lifted, sending him sprawling once more.

The cart creaked several feet forward and Pete raced about it.

By the time he reached the front, Schuld had risen to his knees, his face and breast a filthy, bloody abomination.

“No!” Pete shouted again, rushing to interpose himself between Tibor and his victim.

But the extensor was faster. It fell once more, knocking Schuld over backward.

Pete rushed to straddle the fallen man and raised his arms before Tibor.

“Don’t do it, Tibor!” he cried. “You’ll kill him! Do you hear me! You can’t do it! For the love of God, Tibor! He’s a man! Like you and me! It’s murder! Don’t—”

Pete had braced himself for the blow, but it did not come. Instead, the extensor plunged in from his left and the manual gripper seized hold of his forearm. The cart creaked and swayed at the strain, but Pete was raised into the air—three, four feet above the ground. Then, suddenly, the extensor moved like a cracking whip and he was hurled toward a clump of bushes. He heard Schuld’s moaning as he fell.

He was scratched and poked, but not severely jolted, as the shrubs collapsed to cushion him. He heard the cart creaking again. Then, for several moments, he was unable to move, tangled and enmeshed as he was. As he struggled to free himself, he heard a bubbly gasp, followed by a rasping, choking sound.

Tearing at the twigs and limblets, he was finally able to sit up and behold what Tibor had done.

The extensor was projected out and up, rigid now as a steel pole. Higher above the ground than Pete himself had dangled, hung Schuld, the gripper tight about his throat. His eyes and his tongue protruded. The veins in his forehead stood out like cords. Even as Pete stared, his limbs completed their
Totentanz
, fell slack, hung limp.

“No,” Pete said softly, realizing that it was already too late, that there was nothing at all that he could do.

Tibor, I pray that you never realize what you have done, he thought, raising his hand to cover his eyes, for he was unable to close them or move them. It was planned, Tibor, planned down to the last detail. Except for this. Except for this … It was me. Me that he wanted. Wanted to kill him. Him. At the last moment, the very last moment, he would have shouted. Shouted out to you, Tibor. Shouted, “Ecce! Ecce! Ecce!” And you would have known, you would have felt, you would have beheld, as he desired, planned, required, the necessary death, at my hands, of Carleton Lufteufel. Hanging there, now, all blood and dirt, with eyes that look straight out, forever, across the surface of the world—he wanted me to do that for him, to him, with you to bear witness, here and forever, here and in the great murch in Charlottesville, to bear witness to all the world of the transfiguration of a twisted, tormented being who desired both adoration and punishment, worship and death—here revealed, suddenly, as I slew him, here transfigured, instantly, for you, for all the world, at the moment of his death—the Deus Irae. And God! It could have happened that way! It could have. But you are blinded now with madness and with hate, my friend. May they take this vision with them when they go, I pray. May you never know what you have done. May you never. May you never. Amen.

Rain … A gray world, a chill world: Idaho. Basque country. Sheep. Jai alai. A language they say the Devil himself could not master …

Pete trudged beside the creaking cart. Thank the Lord it was not difficult, he thought, to convince Tibor that Lufteufel’s place was nowhere near the spot Schuld had said it was. Two weeks. Two weeks, and Tibor is still hurting. He must never know how close he really was. He sees Schuld now as a madman. I wish that I could, too. The most difficult thing was the burial. I should have been able to say something, but I was as dumb as that girl with the broken doll in her lap we passed the next day, seated there at the crossroads. I should have managed some sort of prayer. After all, he was a man, he had an immortal soul…. Empty, though, my mouth. My lips were stuck together. We go on … A necessary errand of fools. So long as Tibor can be made to feel that Lufteufel is still somewhere ahead, we must go on. Forever, if it comes to that, looking for a man who is already dead. It was Tibor’s fault, too, to think that God’s vision could indeed be captured, to believe that a mortal artist could daub an epiphany with his colors. It was wrong, it was presumption of the highest order. Yet … He needs me now more than ever, shaken as he is. We must go on … where? Only God knows. The destination is no longer important. I cannot leave him, and he cannot go back— He chuckled. “Empty-handed” was the wrong term.