Pete

“Hello. State Psychiatric Institute.”

“I’d like to make an appointment for an examination.”

“Just a moment. I’ll connect you with the Appointment Desk.”

“Hello. Appointment Desk.”

“I’d like to make an appointment for an examination.”

“Just a moment … What sort of examination?”

“I want to see Doctor Shallot, Eileen Shallot. As soon as possible.”

“Just a moment. I’ll have to check her schedule… Could you make it at two o’clock next Tuesday?”

“That would bejust fine.”

“What is the name, please?”

“DeViUe. Jill DeVille.”

“All right, Miss DeVille. That’s two o’clock, Tuesday.”

“Thank you.”

<p>

The man walked beside the highway. Cars passed along the highway. The cars in the highacceleration lane blurred by.

Traffic was light.

It was 10:30 in the morning, and cold.

The man’s fur-lined collar was turned up, his hands were in his pockets, and he leaned into the wind. Beyond the fence, the road was clean and dry.

The morning sun was buried in clouds. In the dirty light, the man could see the tree a quarter mile ahead.

His pace did not change. His eyes did not leave the tree. The small stones clicked and crunched beneath his shoes.

When he reached the tree he took off his jacket and folded it neatly.

He placed it upon the ground and climbed the tree.

As he moved out onto the limb which extended over the fence, he looked to see that no traffic was approaching. Then he seized the branch with both hands, lowered himself, hung a moment, and dropped onto the highway.

It was a hundred yards wide, the eastbound half of the highway.

He glanced west, saw there was still no traffic coming his way, then began to walk toward the center island. He knew he would never reach it. At this time of day the cars were moving at approximately one hundred sixty miles an hour in the high acceleration lane. He walked on.

A car passed behind him. He did not look back. If the windows were opaqued, as was usually the case, then the occupants were unaware he had crossed their path. They would hear of it later and examine the front end of their vehicle for possible signs of such an encounter.

A car passed in front of him. Its windows were clear. A glimpse of two faces, their mouths made into 0’s, was presented to him, then torn from his sight. His own face remained without expression. His pace did not change. Two more cars rushed by, windows darkened. He had crossed perhaps twenty yards of highway.

Twenty-five…

Something in the wind, or beneath his feet, told him it was coming. He did not look.

Something in the corner of his eye assured him it was coming. His gait did not alter.

Cecil Green had the windows transpared because he liked it that way. His left hand was inside her blouse and her skirt was piled up on her lap, and his right hand was resting on the lever which would lower the seats. Then she pulled away, making a noise down inside her throat.

His head snapped to the left.

He saw the walking man.

He saw the profile which never turned to face him fully. He saw that the man’s gait did not alter.

Then he did not see the man.

There was a slight jar, and the windshield began cleaning itself. Cecil Green raced on.

He opaqued the windows.

“How … ?” he asked after she was in his arms again, and sobbing.

“The monitor didn’t pick him up …”

“He must not have touched the fence …”

“He must have been out of his mind!”

“Still, he could have picfced an easier way.”

It could have been any face … Mine?

Frightened, Cecil lowered the seats.

Charles Render was writing the “Necropolis” chapter for The Missing Link Is Man, which was to be his first book in over four years. Since his return he had set aside every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon to work on it, isolating himself in his office, filling pages with a chaotic longhand.

“There are many varieties of death, as opposed to dying …”

he was writing, just as the intercom buzzed briefly, then long, then again briefly.

“Yes?” he asked it, pushing down on the switch.

“You have a visitor,” and there was a short intake of breath between “a” and “visitor.”

He slipped a small aerosol into his side pocket, then rose and crossed the office.

He opened the door and looked out.

“Doctor … Help …”

Render took three steps, then dropped to .one knee.

“What’s the matter?”

“Come she is … sick,” he growled.

“Sick? How? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t know. You come.”

Render stared into the unhuman eyes.

“What kind of sick?” he insisted.

“Don’t know,” repeated the dog. “Won’t talk. Sits. I … feel, she is sick.” ” .

“How did you get here?”

“Drove. Know the co, or, din, ates … Left car, outside.”

“I’ll call her right now.” Render turned.

“No good. Won’t answer.”

He was right.

Render returned to his inner office for his coat and medkit. He glanced out the window and saw where her car was parked, far below, just inside the entrance to the marginal, where the monitor had released it into manual control. If no one assumed that control a car was automatically parked in neutral. The other vehicles were passed around it.

So simple even a dog can drive one, he reflected. Better get downstairs before a cruiser comes along. It’s probably reported itself stopped there already. Maybe not, though. Might still have a few minutes grace.

He glanced at the huge clock.

“Okay, Sig,” he called out. “Let’s go.”

They took the lift to the ground floor, left by way of the front entrance, and hurried to the car.

Its engine was still idling.

Render opened the passenger-side door and Sigmund leapt in. He squeezed by him into the driver’s seat then, but the dog was already pushing the primary coordinates and the address tabs with his paw.

Looks like I’m in the wrong seat.

He lit a cigarette as the car swept ahead into a U-underpass.

It emerged on the opposite marginal, sat poised a moment, then joined the traffic flow. The dog directed the car into the highacceleration lane.

“Oh,” said the dog, “oh.”

Render felt like patting his head at that moment, but he looked at him, saw that his teeth were bared, and decided against it.

“When did she start acting peculiar?” he asked: “Came home from work. Did not eat. Would not answer me, when I talked. Just sits.”

“Has she ever been like this before?”

“No.”

What could have precipitated it?But maybe she just had a bad day. After all, he’s only a dogsort of.No. He’d know.

But what, then?

“How was she yesterdayand when she left home this morning?”

“Like always.”

Render tried calling her again. There was still no answer.

“You, did it,” said the dog.

“What do you mean?”

“Eyes. Seeing. You. Machine. Bad.”

“No,” said Render, and his hand rested on the unit of stunspray in his pocket.

“Yes,” said the dog, turning to him again. “You will, make her well … ?”

“Of course,” said Render.

Sigmund stared ahead again.

Render felt physically exhilarated and mentally sluggish. He sought the confusion factor. He had had these feelings about the case since that first session. There was something very unsettling about Eileen Shallot: a combination of high intelligence and helplessness, of determination and vulnerability, of sensitivity and bitterness.

Do I find that especially attractive?No. it’s just the countertransference, damn it!

“You smell afraid,” said the dog.

“Then color me afraid,” said Render, “and turn the page.”

They slowed for a series of turns, picked up speed again, slowed again, picked up speed again. Finally, they were traveling along a narrow section of roadway through a semiresidential area of town. The car turned up a side street, proceeded about half a mile further, clicked softly beneath its dashboard, and turned into the parking lot behind a high brick apartment building. The click must have been a special servomech which took over from the point where the monitor released it, because the car crawled across the lot, headed into its transparent parking stall, then stopped. Render turned off the ignition.

Sigmund had already opened the door on his side. Render followed him into the building, and they rode the elevator to the fiftieth floor. The dog dashed on ahead up the hallway, pressed his nose against a plate set low in a doorframe, and waited. After a moment, the door swung several inches inward.

He pushed it open with his shoulder and entered. Render followed, closing the door behind him.

The apartment was large, its walls pretty much unadorned, its color combinations unnerving. A great library of tapes filled one corner; a monstrous combination-broadcaster stood beside it. There was a wide bowlegged table set in front of the window, and a low couch along the right-hand wall; there was a closed door beside the couch; an archway to the left apparently led to other rooms. Eileen sat in an overstuffed chair in the far corner by the window. Sigmund stood beside the chair.

Render crossed the room and extracted a cigarette from his case. Snapping open his lighter, he held the flame until her head turned in that direction.

“Cigarette?” he asked.

“Charles?”

“Right.”

“Yes, thank you. I will.”

She held out her hand, accepted the cigarette, put it to her lips.

“Thanks.What are you doing here?”

“Social call. I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“I didn’t hear a buzz, or a knock.”

“You must have been dozing. Sig let me in.”

“Yes, I must have.” She stretched. “What time is it?”

“It’s close to four-thirty.”

“I’ve been home over two hours then … Must have been very tired …”

“How do you feel now?”

“Fine,” she declared. “Care for a cup of coffee?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

“A steak to go with it?”

“No thanks.”

“Bacardi in the coffee?”

“Sounds good.”

“Excuse me then. It’ll only take a moment.”

She went through the door beside the sofa and Render caught a glimpse of a large, shiny, automatic kitchen.

“Well?” he whispered to the dog.

Sigmund shook his head.

“Not same.”

Render shook his head.

He deposited his coat on the sofa, folding it carefully about the medkit. He sat beside it and thought.

Did I throw too big a chunk of seeing at once? Is she suffering from depressive side-effectssay, memory repressions, nervous fatigue? Did I upset her sensory adaptation syndrome somehow? Why have I been proceeding so rapidly anyway?

There’s no real hurry-Am I so damned eager to write the thing up?Or am I doing it because she wants me to? Could she be that strong, consciously or unconsciously? Or am I that vulnerablesomehow?

She called him to the kitchen to carry out the tray. He set it on the table and seated himself across from her.

“Good coffee,” he said, burning his lips on the cup.

“Smart machine,” she stated, facing his voice.

Sigmund stretched out on the carpet next to the table, lowered his head between his forepaws, sighed, and closed his eyes.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Render, “whether or not there were any aftereffects to that last sessionlike increased synesthesiac experiences, or dreams involving forms, or hallucinations or …”

“Yes,” she said flatly, “dreams.”

“What kind?”

“That last session. I’ve dreamt it over, and over.”

“Beginning to end?”

“No, there’s no special order to the events. We’re riding through the city, or over the bridge, or sitting at the table, or walking toward the carjust flashes, like that. Vivid ones.”

“What sort of feelings accompany theseflashes?”

“I don’t know. They’re all mixed up.”

“What are your feelings now, as you recall them?”

“The same, all mixed up.”

“Are you afraid?”

“N-no. I don’t think so.”

“Do you want to take a vacation from the thing? Do you feel we’ve been proceeding too rapidly?”

“No. That’s not it at all. It’swell, it’s like learning to swim.

When you finally learn how, why then you swim and you swim and you swim until you’re all exhausted. Then you just lie there gasping in air and remembering what it was like, while your friends all hover and chew you out for overexerting yourself and it’s a good feeling, even though you do take a chill and there’s pins and needles inside all your muscles. At least, that’s the-way I do things. I felt that way after the first session and after this last one. First times are always very special times … The pins and the needles are gone though, and I’ve caught my breath again. Lord, I don’t want to stop now! I feel fine.”

“Do you usually take a nap in the afternoon?”

The ten red nails of her fingernails moved across the tabletop as she stretched.

“… Tired,” she smiled, swallowing a yawn. “Half the staffs on vacation or sick leave and I’ve been beating my brains out all week. I was about ready to fall on my face when I left work. I feel all right now that I’ve rested, though.”

She picked up her coffee cup with both hands, took a large swallow.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Good. I was a bit worried about you. I’m glad to see there was no reason.”

She laughed.

“Worried? You’ve read Doctor Riscomb’s notes on my analysisand on the ONT&R trialand you think I’m the sort to worry about? Ha! I have an operationally beneficent neurosis concerning my adequacy as a human being. It focuses my energies, coordinates my efforts toward achievement. It enhances my sense of identity …”

“You do have one hell of a memory,” he noted. “That’s almost verbatim.”

“Of course.”

“You had Sigmund worried today, too.”

“Sig? How?”

The dog stirred uneasily, opened one eye.

“Yes,” he growled, glaring up at Render. “He needs, a ride, home.”

“Have you been driving the car again?”

“Yes.”

“After I told you not to?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was a, fraid. You would, not, answer me, when I talked.”

“I was very tiredand if you ever take the car again. I’m going to have the door fixed so you can’t come and go as you please.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

- “I, see.”

“You are never to doit again.”

“Sorry.” His eye never left Render; it was like a burning lens.

Render looked away.

“Don’t be too hard on the poor fellow,” he said. “After all, he thought you were ill and he went for the doctor. Supposing he’d been right? You’d owe him thanks, not a scolding.”

Unmollified, Sigmund glared a moment longer and closed his eye.

“He has to be told when he does wrong,” she finished.

“I suppose,” he said, drinking his coffee. “No harm done, anyhow. Since I’m here, let’s talk shop. I’m writing something and I’d like an opinion.”

“Great. Give me a footnote?”

“Two or three.In your opinion, do the general underlying motivations that lead to suicide differ in different periods of history, or in different cultures?”

“My well-considered opinion is no, they don’t,” she said.

“Frustrations can lead to depressions or frenzies; and if these are severe enough, they can lead to self-destruction. You ask me about motivations and I think they stay pretty much the same. I feel this is a cross-cultural, cross-temporal aspect of the human condition. I don’t think it could be changed without changing the basic nature of man.”

“Okay. Check. Now, what of the inciting element?” he asked. “Let man be a constant, his environment is still a variable. If he is placed in an overprotective life-situation, do you feel it would take more or less to depress himor stimulate him to frenzythan it would take in a not so protective environment?”

“Hm. Being case-oriented, I’d say it would depend on the man. But I see what you’re driving at: a mass predisposition to jump out windows at the drop of a hatthe window even opening itself for you, because you asked it tothe revolt of the bored masses. I don’t like the notion. I hope it’s wrong.”

“So do I, but I was thinking of symbolic suicides toofunctional disorders that occur for pretty flimsy reasons.”

“Aha! Your lecture last month: autopsychomimesis. I have the tape. Well-told, but I can’t agree.”

“Neither can I, now. I’m rewriting that whole section “Thanatos in Cloudcuckooland,’ I’m calling it. It’s really the death-instinct moved nearer the surface.”

“If I get you a scalpel and a cadaver, will you cut out the death-instinct and let me touch it?”

“Couldn’t,” he put the grin into his voice, “it would be all used up in a cadaver. Find me a volunteer though, and he’ll prove my case by volunteering.”

“Your logic is unassailable,” she smiled. “Get us some more coffee-, okay?”

Render went to the kitchen, spiked and filled the cups, drank a glass of water, returned to the living room. Eileen had not moved; neither had Sigmund.

“What do you do when you’re not busy being a Shaper?” she asked him.

“The same things most people doeat, drink, sleep, talk, visit friends and not-friends, visit places, read …”

“Are you a forgiving man?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“Then forgive me. I argued with a woman today, a woman named DeViUe.”

“What about?”

“Youand she accused me of such things it were better my mother had not borne me. Are you going to marry her?”

“No, marriage is like alchemy. It served an important purpose once, but I hardly feel it’s here to stay.”

“Good.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I gave her a clinic referral card that said, ‘Diagnosis: Bitch.

Prescription: Drug therapy and a tight gag.’ “

“Oh,” said Render, showing interest.

“She tore it up and threw it in my face.”

“I wonder why?”

She shrugged, smiled, made a gridwork on the tablecloth.

” ‘Fathers and elders, I ponder,’ ” sighed Render, ” ‘what is hell?’ “

” 1 maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love,’ ” she finished. “Was Dostoevsky right?”

“I doubt it. I’d put him into group therapy, myself. That’d be real hell for himwith all those people acting like his characters, and enjoying it so.”

Render put down his cup, pushed his chair away from the table.

“I suppose you must be going now?”

“I really should,” said Render.

“And I can’t interest you in food?”

“No.”

She stood.

“Okay, I’ll get my coat.”

“I could drive back myself and just set the car to return.”

“No! I’m frightened by the notion of empty cars driving around the city. I’d feel the thing was haunted for the next two and a half weeks.

“Besides,” she said, passing through the archway, “you promised me Winchester Cathedral.”

“You want to do it today?”

“If you can be persuaded.”

As Render stood deciding, Sigmund rose to his feet. He stood directly before him and stared upward into his eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it, several times, but no sounds emerged.

Then he turned away and left the room.

“No,” Eileen’s voice came back, “you will stay here until I return.”

Render picked up his coat and put it on, stuffing the medkit into the far pocket.

As they walked up the hall toward the elevator. Render thought he heard a very faint and very distant howling sound.

In this place, of all places. Render knew he was the master of all things.

He was at home on those alien worlds, without time, those worlds where flowers copulate and the stars do battle in the heavens, falling at last to the ground, bleeding, like so many spilt and shattered chalices, and the seas part to reveal stairways leading down, and arms emerge from caverns, waving torches that flame like liquid facesa midwinter night’s nightmare, summer go a-begging, Render knewfor he had visited those worlds on a professional basis for the better part of a decade. With the crooking of a finger he could isolate the sorcerers, bring them to trial for treason against the realmaye, and he could execute them, could appoint their successors.

Fortunately, this trip was only a courtesy call …

He moved forward through the glade, seeking her.

He could feel her awakening presence all about him.

He pushed through the branches, stood beside the lake. It was cold, blue, and bottomless, the lake, reflecting that slender willow which had become the station of her arrival.

“Eileen!”

The willow swayed toward him, swayed advay.

“Eileen! Come forth!”

Leaves fell, floated upon the lake, disturbed its mirror-like placidity, distorted the reflections.

“Eileen?”

All the leaves yellowed at once then, dropped down into the water. The tree ceased its swaying. There was a strange sound in the darkening sky, like the humming of high wires on a cold day.

Suddenly there was a double file of moons passing through the heavens.

Render selected one, reached up, and pressed it. The others vanished as he did so, and the world brightened; the humming went out of the air.

He circled the lake to gain a subjective respite from the rejection-action and his counter to it. He moved up along an aisle of pines toward the place where he wanted the cathedral to occur. Birds sang now in the trees. The wind came softly by him. He felt her presence quite strongly.

“Here, Eileen. Here.”

She walked beside him then, green silk, hair of bronze, eyes of molten emerald; she wore an emerald in her forehead. She walked in green slippers over the pine needles, saying: “What happened?”

“You were afraid.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps you fear the cathedral. Are you a witch?” he smiled.

“Yes, but it’s my day off.”

He laughed, and he took her arm, and they rounded an island of foliage, and there was the cathedral reconstructed on a grassy rise, pushing its way above them and above the trees, climbing into the middle air, breathing out organ notes, reflecting a stray ray of sunlight from a pane of glass.

“Hold tight to the world,” he said. “Here comes the guided tour.”

They moved forward and entered.

” ‘… With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces,’ ” he said. “Got that from the guidebook. This is the north transept…”

” ‘Greensleeves,’ ” she said, “the organ is playing ‘Greensleeves.’ “

“So it is. You can’t blame me for that though.Observe the scalloped capitals”

“I want to go nearer the music.”

“Very well. This way then.”

Render felt that something was wrong. He could not put his finger on it.

Everything retained its solidity …

Something passed rapidly then, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render smiled at that, remembering now; it was like a slip of the tongue: for a moment he had confused Eileen with Jill yes, that was what had happened.

Why, then …

A burst of white was the altar. He had never seen it before, anywhere. All the walls were dark and cold about them.

Candles flickered in corners and high niches. The organ chorded thunder under invisible hands.

Render knew that something was wrong.

He turned to Eileen Shallot, whose hat was a green cone towering up into the darkness, trailing wisps of green veiling.

Her throat was in shadow, but …

“That necklaceWhere?”

“I don’t know,” she smiled.

The goblet she held radiated a rosy light. It was reflected from her emerald. It washed him like a draft of cool air.

“Drink?” she asked.

“Stand still,” he ordered.

He willed the walls to fall down. They swam in shadow.

“Stand still!” he repeated urgently. “Don’t do anything. Try not even to think.

“Fall down!” he cried. And the walls were blasted in all directions and the roof was flung over the top .of the world, and they stood amid ruins lighted by a single taper. The night was black as pitch.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, still holding the goblet out toward him.

“Don’t think. Don’t think anything,” he said. “Relax. You are very tired. As that candle flickers and wanes so does your consciousness. You can barely keep awake. You can hardly stay on your feet. Your eyes are closing. There is nothing to see here anyway.”

He willed the candle to go out. It continued to burn.

“I’m not tired. Please have a drink.”

He heard organ music through the night. A different tune, one he did not recognize at first.

“I need your cooperation.”

“All right. Anything.”

“Look! The moon!” he pointed.

She looked upward and the moon appeared from behind an inky cloud.

“… And another, and another.”

Moons, like strung pearls, proceeded across the blackness.

“The last one will be red,” he stated.

It was.

He reached out then with his right index finger, slid his arm sideways along his field of vision, then tried to touch the red moon.

His arm ached, it burned. He could not move it.

“Wake up!” he screamed.

The red moon vanished, and the white ones.

“Please take a drink.”

He dashed the goblet from her hand and turned away. When he turned back she was still holding it before him.

“A drink?”

He turned and fled into the night.

It was like running through a waist-high snowdrift. It was wrong. He was compounding the error by runninghe was minimizing his strength, maximizing hers. It was sapping his energies, draining him.

He stood still in the midst of the blackness.

“The world around me moves,” he said. “I am its center.”

“Please have a drink,” she said, and he was standing in the glade beside their table set beside the lake. The lake was black and the moon was silver, and high, and out of his reach. A single candle flickered on the table, making her hair as silver as her dress. She wore the moon on her brow. A bottle of RomaneeConti stood on the white cloth beside a widebrimmed wine glass. It was filled to overflowing, that glass, and rosy beads clung to its lip. He was very thirsty, and she was lovelier than anyone he had ever seen before, and her necklace, sparkled, and the breeze came cool off the lake, and there was somethingsomething he should remember …

He took a step toward her and his armor clinked lightly as he moved. He reached toward the glass and his right arm stiffened with pain and fell back to his side.

“You are wounded!”

Slowly, he turned his head. The blood flowed from the open wound in his bicep and ran down his arm and dripped from his fingertips. His armor had been breached. He forced himself to look away.

“Drink this, love. It will heal you.”

She stood.

“I will hold the glass.”

He stared at her as she raised it to his lips.

“Who am I?” he asked.

She did not answer him, but something repliedwithin a splashing of waters out over the lake: “You are Render, the Shaper.”

“Yes, I remember,” he said; and turning his mind to the one lie which might break the entire illusion he forced his mouth to say: “Eileen Shallot, I hate you.”

The world shuddered and swam about him, was shaken, as by a huge sob.

“Charles!” she screamed, and the blackness swept over them.

“Wake up! Wake up!” he cried, and his right arm burned and ached and bled in the darkness.

He stood alone in the midst of a white plain. It was silent, it was endless. It sloped away toward the edges of the world. It gave off its own light, and the sky was no sky, but was nothing overhead. Nothing. He was alone. His own voice echoed back to him from the end of the world: “… hate you,” it said, “…

hate you.”

He dropped to his knees. He was Render.

He wanted to cry.

A red moon appeared above the plain, casting a ghastly light over the entire expanse. There was a wall of mountains to the left of him, another to his right.

He raised his right arm. He helped it with his left hand. He clutched his wrist, extended his index finger. He reached for the moon.

Then there came a howl from high in the mountains, a great wailing cryhalf-human, all challenge, all loneliness, and all remorse. He saw it then, treading upon the mountains, its tail brushing the snow from their highest peaks, the ultimate loupgarou of the NorthFenris, son of Lokiraging at the heavens.

It leapt into the air. It swallowed the moon.

It landed near him, and its great eyes blazed yellow. It stalked him on soundless pads, across the cold white fields that lay between the mountains; and he backed away from it, up hills and down slopes, over crevasses and rifts, through valleys, past stalagmites and pinnaclesunder the edges of glaciers, beside frozen river beds, and always downwardsuntil its hot breath bathed him and its laughing mouth was opened above him.

He turned then and his feet became two gloaming rivers carrying him away.

The world jumped backwards. He glided over the slopes.

Downward. Speeding

Away…

He looked back over his shoulder.

In the distance, the gray shape loped after him.

He felt that it could narrow the gap if it chose. He had to move faster.

The world reeled about him. Snow began to fall.

He raced on.

Ahead, a blur, a broken outline.

He tore through the veils of snow which now seemed to be falling upward from off the groundlike strings of bubbles.

He approached the shattered form.

Like a swimmer he approachedunable to open his mouth to speak, for fear of drowningof drowning and not knowing, of never knowing.

He could not check his forward motion; he was swept tidelike toward the wreck. He came to a stop, at last, before it.

Some things never change. They are things which have long ceased to exist as objects and stand solely as never-to-becalendared occasions outside that sequence of elements called Time.

Render stood there and did not care if Fenris leapt upon his back and ate his brains. He had covered his eyes, but he could not stop the seeing. Not this time. He did not care about anything. Most of himself lay dead at his feet.

There was a howl. A gray shape swept past him.

The baleful eyes and bloody muzzle rooted within the wrecked car, champing through the steel, the glass, groping inside for …

“No! Brute! Chewer of corpses!” he cried. “The dead are sacred! My dead are sacred!”

He had a scalpel in his hand then, and he slashed expertly at the tendons, the bunches of muscle on the straining shoulders, the soft belly, the ropes of the arteries.

Weeping, he dismembered the monster, limb by limb, and it bled and it bled, fouling the vehicle and the remains within it with its infernal animal juices, dripping and running until the whole plain was reddened and writhing about them.

Render fell across the pulverized hood, and it was soft and warm and dry. He wept upon it.

“Don’t cry,” she said.

He was hanging onto her shoulder then, holding her tightly, there beside the black lake beneath the moon that was Wedgwood. A single candle flickered upon their table. She held the glass to his lips.

“Please drink it.”

“Yes, give it to me!”

He gulped the wine that was all softness and lightness. It burned within him. He felt his strength returning.

“I am …”

“Render, the Shaper,” splashed the lake.

“No!”

He turned and ran again, looking for the wreck. He had to go back, to return …

“You can’t.”

“I can!” he cried. “I can, if I try…”

Yellow flames coiled through the thick air. Yellow serpents.

They coiled, glowing, about his ankles. Then through the murk, two-headed and towering, approached his Adversary.

Small stones rattled past him. An overpowering odor corkscrewed up his nose and into his head.

“Shaper!” came the bellow from one head.

“You have returned for the reckoning!” called the other.

Render stared, remembering.

“No reckoning, Thaumiel,” he said. “I beat you and I chained you forRothman, yes, it was Rothmanthe cabalist.”

He traced a pentagram in the air. “Return to Qliphoth. I banish you.”

“This place be Qliphoth.”

“… By Khamael, the angel of blood, by the hosts of Seraphim, in the Name of Elohim Gebor, I bid you vanish!”

“Not this time,” laughed both heads.

It advanced.

Render backed slowly away, his feet bound by the yellow serpents. He could feel the chasm opening behind him. The world was a jigsaw puzzle coming apart. He could see the pieces separating.

“Vanish!”

The giant roared out its double-laugh.

Render stumbled.

“This way, lovel”

She stood within a small cave to his right.

He shook his bead and backed toward the chasm.

Thaumiel reached out toward him.

Render toppled back over the edge.

“Charles!” she screamed, and the world shook itself apart with her wailing.

“Then Vernichtung,” he answered as he fell. “I join you in darkness.”

Everything came to an end.

“I want to see Doctor Charles Render.”

“I’m sorry, that is impossible.”

“But I skip-jetted all the way here, just to thank him. I’m a new man! He changed my life!”

“I’m sorry. Mister Erikson. When you called this morning, I told you it was impossible.”

“Sir, I’m Representative Eriksonand Render once did me a great service.”

“Then you can do him one now. Go home.”

“You can’t talk to me that way!”

“I just did. Please leave. Maybe next year sometime…”

“But a few words can do wonders …”

“Save them!”

“I-I’m sorry …”

Lovely as it was, pinked over with the morningthe slopping, steaming bowl of the seahe knew that it had to end.

Therefore…

He descended the high tower stairway and he entered the courtyard. He crossed to the bower of roses and he looked down upon the pallet set in its midst.

“Good morrow, m’lord,” he said.

“To you the same,” said the knight, his blood mingling with the earth, the flowers, the grasses, flowing from his wound, sparkling over his armor, dripping from his fingertips.

“Naught hath healed?”

The knight shook his head.

“I empty. I wait.”

“Your waiting is near ended.”

“What mean you?” He sat upright.

“The ship. It approacheth harbor.”

The knight stood. He leaned his back against a mossy treetrunk. He stared at the huge, bearded servitor who continued to speak, words harsh with barbaric accents: “It cometh like a dark swan before the windreturning.”

“Dark, say you? Dark?”

“The sails be black. Lord Tristram.”

“You lie!”

“Do you wish to see? To see for yourself?Look then!”

He gestured.

The earth quaked, the wall toppled. The dust swirled and settled. From where they stood they could see the ship moving into the harbor on the wings of the night.

“No! You lied!-See! They are white!”

The dawn danced upon the waters. The shadows fled from the ship’s sails.

“No, you fool! Black! They must be!”

“White! Whitd-lsolde! You have kept faith! You have returned!”

He began running toward the harbor.

“Come back!Your wound! You are ill!Stop …”

The sails were white beneath a sun that was a red button which the servitor reached quickly to touch.

Night fell.