Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (14 page)

 
          
Death
vanished momentarily. It reappeared upon Weinberger’s chest and made a foray
towards his neck, then leapt back. It seemed confused, disorientated, as it
would be by finding the same death doubled — shared and synchronised — and this
not even being a genuine death. No wonder it was perplexed. Appearing and
disappearing, it shuttled from one man to the other. But it was more in
existence than out of it. It was probably present all the time now. Its
flickerings and shiftings were quantum jumps from one location to the next with
no real interval of nonexistence in between.

 
          
‘Where
have all our own reflections gone to?’ wondered Jim. ‘We’re a sort of
reflection now, ourselves — and a reflection can’t see another reflection. It
only sees the substance — the original. But we can still see all the cages. So
Death’s still trapped. By
us,
and by the electricity.’

 
          
Death
did not look so frighteningly rapine tonight. There was an eerie, unearthly
beauty about the creature.
Though surely a cruel beauty.

 
          
“Whatever
is it?” Jim whispered. He spoke without stopping to wonder what medium would
carry his voice. But he heard his own words clearly.
As did
Weinberger, who gestured impatiently.

 
          
“We’re
up and out, Jim. We made it!” he crowed.

 
          
Weinberger
seemed less concerned with the nature of the creature than with the bliss of
hanging above it like a hawk about to drop on to another bird which had got
grounded, tangled in a wire trap. He spread his scrawny arms as though soaring
in the thermal above his own body heat. His out-thrown hand buffeted Jim’s
floating body, but softly. If it had been moving more swiftly his hand might
have passed right through Jim, their substances mixing like amoebas in reverse.

 
          
By
partly shutting his eyes, Jim thought that he could make out a silvery thread
tethering Weinberger, kitelike, to his possum body. A similar thin thread
seemed to link Jim to the ‘dead’ original below.

 
          
Just
then a sudden change came over their surroundings. The time switch must have
cut the power to the cage.

 
          
No
longer were they adrift in a honeycomb of translucent golden wax. There was
fogginess, still, but it was a white fog which filtered light from beyond it —
‘beyond* being on all sides, though perhaps more so in one direction than
another. It wasn’t really a fog at all, decided Jim. It was simply an
out-of-focus quality as though he was a short-sighted man who had suddenly lost
his spectacles. By moving closer, in whichever direction, he ought to be able
to see the nature of that foggy light more clearly . . .

 
          
At
the same time he was aware of shadows too: a whole pyramid of shadows. The
House of Death loomed over them in the ordinary world. Beyond its shadowy
bounds was Egremont. Beyond Egremont was the rest of the shadowy planet.

 
          
Jim
realized that he could choose to fly into those shadows of reality, or else he
could fly into the white fog. Both were present. Both were separate and
distinct.

 
          
If
they chose to fly off into the shadows they could range throughout the ordinary
world, visiting
Lake
Tulane
or Gracchus or anywhere else they desired.
They could pass through shadow walls into locked rooms. They could spy on
ardent lovers. They could let themselves be drawn to old haunts, to old
friends. They could be voyeurs, spectators — unseen and unfelt by the living
who were
inhabiting
their ordinary bodies. The silver
threads would be their lifelines, however far they ranged.

 
          
It
was very familiar, that shadow world. With its power of familiarity it drew
them.
Because they were alive.

 
          
But
if they flew into the fog, towards the source of light rather than towards
familiar shadows . . .
where to, then
?

 
          
It
was so much easier to concentrate on the shadows of the things they knew! The
shadows
drew,
the fog was out of focus.

 
          
Red
Death hopped from body to body, below. With its sharp little beak or the
scalpel hooks on its faery wings it might cut their silver threads of life!
If it could find those threads.
If that was what it was
hunting for . .
.

 
          
It
had quit hunting now. It had stopped its questing from one body to the other.

 
          
As
though aware that it was no longer caged it flew up suddenly, flickeringly,
towards them. Weinberger grabbed for it. It darted to one side, avoiding him.
Its crystal eyes glittered at the two floating reflection-bodies: registering
them, discarding them from its attention. It flew off into the fog. Not into
the shadow.

 
          
As
it winged fog-wards it seemed to stabilize. No longer did it flicker. Out
‘there’ it was more real and permanent. Yet it flew with a curiously veering
style of flight,
arcing
this way then the other way as
though incapable of flying in a straight line.

 
          
Weinberger
thrashed his empty hand about in annoyance. It was with his left hand that he
had tried to snatch and bait the creature. Perhaps the nerves in his right hand
still remembered all too painfully what had happened last time.

 
          
“Give
chase, Nathan! We mustn’t lose sight of it!’’

 
          
Already
the creature was passing out of focus. Already it had become less of a
definable ‘something’ and more of
a reddish
anything
swinging from side to side like a pendulum bob which got smaller with each
swing.

 
          
The
two men moved as one into the fog, without thinking how they moved, merely
willing it. They clove the fog as sleekly as two seals.

 
          
Very soon they
found that they could no
more fly a straight course than the creature did. What seemed to be fog was
actually an enormous clutter of prisms and polyhedra of many different shapes
and hues, afloat in all directions. These ‘fog crystals*
were
all approximately the same size: just a little smaller than the cage for Death
itself. They were great jewels, drifting, jostling and rotating within the
ether of their flight.

 
          
If
they had flown in a straight line they would soon have struck one of these —
and perhaps plunged inside it, for there was something about the faces of the
crystals that suggested still pools rather than hard sheets of glass. Most of
the crystals seemed to repel them gently, as they passed among them. But a few
attracted them, pulling softly . . .

 
          
Now
that they were in the midst of the crystal horde the fog was no longer white at
all, except away in the distance. (Or were they in the midst? Maybe they were
still only on the very fringe.) The immediate vicinity was multicoloured with
the spillage from all the floating prisms and gems. Further off, where all the
colours of the crystals recombined, was that hint of white light. Here, though,
was ruby. Nearby was sapphire. Above, was
garnet.
Beyond was emerald . . .

 
          
“Wait!”

 
          
Intrigued,
Jim slowed and hovered by a ruby larger than
himself
which was turning very slowly, weightlessly. He pressed closer to it; it seemed
softly to resist him. A safe one, this ruby, somehow... It did not want him to
dive into it. (But how could it ‘want’ anything?)

 
          
Weinberger
hung beside him impatiently, though reluctant to press on alone. Anyway, they
had almost overhauled Death. They could allow it a little leeway.

 
          
As
Jim shifted about, trying to see something inside the ruby, suddenly the jewel space
opened for him — though he knew that he was still safely outside it. Its
interior faces unfolded like falling cards; and he saw, as through a fish-eye
lens, a world: a world in miniature, yet whole, full-grown.

 
          
It
was a world of crystal crags and shattered blocks and lakes of solidified lava.
Bubbles had burst in the lava before it had cooled and set into great eggcup
shapes. An angry, gritty wind blew through that world. A large red sun hung in
the sky, providing the ruby light. People nested in the lava eggcups which
sheltered them somewhat from the grit and wind and which concentrated a little
the feeble warmth provided by the sun. It did not look like a happy or a
comforting world . . .

 
          
“Do
you see? Don’t look too long!
Do you
seel
”

 
          
Somehow,
Jim feared that if he looked too long into the jewel, despite its soft, almost
‘satisfied’ repulsion of him he might end up inside it.

 
          
“No . . . what?
Yeah
—!”

 
          
“Come
on, then.”

 
          
They
chased Death again, recovering their lost ground, and paused again beside a
smoky garnet. Catching the angle of vision for this jewel, they saw two amber
suns inside. The suns were oval, linked by a curving golden whip wrapped round
their waists. The world which they illuminated was a jungle hell of swamp and
tangled islands riotous with violent vegetation. Great pink and white pitcher
plants yawned wide their gullets like rows of hungry blotched carp standing on
their tails. Sundew-bushes spread wide diadems of sparkling sticky liquid
light. Vines thrashed about and slithered like snakes, trying to strangle each
other with knotted nooses. Hummingbirds with dagger beaks hovered in the
sanctuaries (for them) of anemone-shrubs whose polyp tentacles suckered other
little bodies, and skeletons, to them. These bright birds shot forth like darts
from their deathly havens to stab lurid butterflies. Venus’s fly-traps held
spikes agape.

 
          
A
naked woman stood on the only bare spit of land; a writhing tentacle-arm
sprouted from her chest like a hugely elongated third breast. She advanced
across the spit towards an island, waving her breast tentacle before her, and
as she waved it the sticky blobs of sundew withdrew from her path, and the
pitcher plants shut their gullets so that she could stride across them like
stepping stones, and the spikes of the fly-traps snapped shut prematurely.
Somehow her tentacle controlled the vegetation. The woman howled at the sky,
and began to sing . . .

 
          
“Alien
worlds: is that where dead souls go to?”

 
          
“I
doubt it, Jim. Alien worlds fill up with alien souls, not human souls.”

 
          
“Is
that woman human?”

 
          
“I
guess she’s as human as she can manage to be.”

 
          
The
jungle thrashed about while the woman sang. She was playing it, compelling it
to bend this way and that, forcing the plants to open up again and eat each
other: swallow each other, strangle each other, tear each other to pieces,
dissolve each other —
till there was a knoll of land
completely cleared in the middle of the island for her to lie down on to sleep.

 
          
“If
that’s how she gets her rest, I’d hate to see what she does when she’s feeling
lively!”

 
          
The
woman was raw power.

 
          
“That’s
her
world,” said Jim. “It’s the world
she fantasizes, made real. It’s full of all her lunacies come true. You’re
right: it isn’t an alien planet at all. It’s an imagination world.
Hers.”

 
          
“Or
ours. We could be imagining her.”

 
          
“I
don’t think so. But if we dived into a crystal we could check that out.”

 
          
“No
thanks. Death hasn’t dived into any of them yet.”

 
          
They
sped on.

 
          
Inside
a third jewel, a yellow
zircon,
was a velvety garden
with yew hedges, arbours, bowers, pergolas, gazebos. The garden stretched on
and on over hill, down dale. Obscene black statues stood about the lawns and
peeked from behind bushes. A naked orgy was in progress on one of the lawns.
All the participants had grossly distorted sexual organs, or else their sexual
organs were in the wrong place. One man sported a great penis for a nose.
Another man’s whole head was a penis with eyes and nose and mouth. Worse yet
was a mobile penis on legs which seemed to have been torn out of a giant’s
groin and set down to run about. One woman’s face had labia where her lips
should have been and nipples instead of eyes; her actual eyes were set in her
breasts . . .

 
          
They
watched this world for more moments than they had intended, forcing themselves
to stay in place despite the soft contrary thrust. The infrared creature had
winged so far ahead of them by the time they let themselves drift away that it
had almost disappeared.

 
          
Hastily
they sped above, beneath and around many other world- crystals. More seemed to
attract than to repel them now. Jim couldn’t be sure, having no wish to yield
to their attraction, but it seemed to him that those crystals which did attract
were like blanks with no world inside them, ‘wanting’ someone to enter and
stamp their own vision upon uncreated territory.

 
          
Away
to one side something tiny — not Death — caught Jim’s notice.

 
          
“Look!”

 
          
It
was a little wriggling brown
thing.
. . he couldn’t
make it out. Then Red Death was there too. Death dodged out from around a shoal
of crystals. But it was a different Death from the one that they were chasing.
That one still raced on ahead. This second Death dived at the wriggling thing,
then
veered away — just as the wriggling thing struck a
golden crystal. Instantly the crystal convulsed, and split. It became two
golden crystals that slowly moved apart. One of these crystals remained
‘blank’, but the other was full of a play of light and transformation for a
short while before it settled down.

 
          
The
second Death flew off at speed. It had been like an old warplane releasing a
bomb or missile: namely, the wriggling thing.

 
          
Weinberger
called out something about Tibetans.

 
          
“What
Tibetans? They’re all dead, in the War. Russian bombs, Chinese bombs, radiation
...”

 
          
“The old Tibetans!
They said that if a dead soul follows the
wrong light after death, then it winds up in some foul alien world. That’s what
these crystals are — and we’ve seen how foul they are inside. There must be
billions of them — enough for everyone on Earth, past, present, future!
One each.”

 
          
“One each?
But I saw more than one.
person
in that first one.
And what about in the orgy world?
I
don’t know if those were all people, but. . .”

 
          
“Did
you see more than one
real
person? Or
were the others all just fantasy actors and actresses — the furniture of one
dead soul?”

 
          
BURLINGAME
PUBLIC LIBRARY
 
480 PRIMROSE ROAD
 
BURLINGAME
.
CA 94010

 
          
Jim
shuddered. It was far better that the soul should
not
survive death, if the alternative was this: to be deluded for
ever more!

 
          
Deluded.
Or, perhaps,
creative
?
Creating a whole world for oneself?
A world of one’s own choice?

 
          
“Somewhere
in all this there must be paradises.’’

 
          
“Must
there? Oh, there once may have been — and in that case I guess there still will
be. But who believes in a heaven now? And if you don’t believe, you’ve crapped
out. Besides, who’s to say that any of this exists for man’s benefit? Who’s to
say, Jim?”

 
          
“Maybe
the dead souls in those worlds could say?”

 
          
“Jim,
I see Death as hauling souls out, and dumping each one into a separate crystal
— to
fertilise
it. So that Death can
feed on it. So that Death can have fun. Hell, we just saw that other Death do
that! It dumped a soul.”

 
          
“If
that wriggling thing was a soul . . . That Death was like a warplane, firing a
missile.”

 
          
(‘Is
that exactly what I saw? Was that exactly how it happened?’)

 
          
“Death’s
a parasite, but it’s an almighty powerful one. We’re like the aphids that it
milks. Here is its honeycomb, and we’re its honey. Our fantasies are. Our
anguish is. All our hallucinations, made real. It squeezes our lives into those
crystals,” Weinberger said.

 
          
“If it catches us.
But what about all those sudden,
accidental deaths which happen too quickly for Death to get there in time?
The ones that give off no signal?
Where do
those souls go, damn it?”

 
          
“Maybe
they reach the white light beyond, whatever it is. Peace, union ... I see Death
as —”

 
          
“I
don’t see Death at all.
Anywhere.
Where’s it gone to, Nathan? We’ve lost it.”

 
          
They
sped faster, hunting, trying to pick up the trail. They failed. After a while
they drifted to a halt.