by D Keith Mano
The pain ended. Its eerie, quick vanishing scared Priest. Nervous electricity had shorted out. At the jaw, the temples, behind one ear, skin burst open with swelling. Both ankles were the same size now. Hands locked themselves inside his gloves: the fingers spread. Lips, split sausages, were far in front of his mouth. Priest splashed; then he sat outside the rainwater pool. Dim light fell through the holed, high roof: Priest watched cheeks grow under his eyes. The right cheek exploded, spitting blood and lymph. Bees still stung him; there were dozens in the air, but he heard only, did not feel them. Pulse nearly doubled its rate. He was delirious, full of useless, adrenal energy. He swung his arms. A protective, choking mucus closed his throat. Priest raled loudly.
The door opened. Two guardsmen scuttled through. They separated, flanking him, crouched, stun cans out of holsters. Priest recognized the First Monitor’s chevrons. He studied their approach idly; he was interested, not yet concerned. His respiration had become rapid and convulsive. He kicked heels in the water. Alternately a flush, a wave of cold gooseflesh, traveled from his forehead downward. Vision closed to slits: his brow ridge gradually protruded. The men unfastened masks. Priest saw the junior guardsman’s shark-gash mouth. For a moment, hallucinating, he supposed that this was his own reflection. He tried to shut the mouth, but his tongue, bloated, had wedged between molars. He expectorated dead bees. The First Monitor gestured: Priest stood uncertainly. The junior guardsman bent to collect insect carcasses, evidence. Legally, Priest knew, he had committed murder. While the First Monitor covered Priest with his aerosol can, the junior extracted a death capsule. He forced it into Priest’s hand. The fingers would not close. It dropped through.
The junior guardsman chuckled; he acted the fool. His tongue lapped over back wisdom teeth, out of his mouth, a dog panting. He licked high on his own cheekbone, almost to the eye. Priest was fascinated: his brain, delirious, over-productive, tried to rationalize what seemed an illusion. The junior’s right eye migrated slowly around the front of his face, the nose turned. Features crowded into profile. The junior held his left arm up at the elbow; he peeled the cuff down, a sleight-of-hand artist’s device; Priest was engrossed. Then the right fist slugged alongside Priest’s eye, and Priest heard sssht when the stressed flesh burst again. He fell, legs stiff, rolling over the back edge of his heels. Moon face seemed to deflate: immediately it filled again. Priest saw only from one eye; blood glued the left lids. The junior rammed both knees into Priest’s belly, pinned him on the floor. Exhaling, Priest spluttered. Many guardsmen appeared. The many that were the First Monitor stepped closer, aerosol cans fitted each with a medium-distance nozzle. The junior guardsman had pills. Then the junior was made single by a single act: he pinched Priest’s lower lip and yanked it down. Priest’s body thrilled with a chemical exuberance; he tapped fingers on the wooden flooring, as though impatient. His jaws came open.
The aerosol can fell. It bonked end on end, made a bow tie of blurring motion. It found a slant in the floor, rolled away. The First Monitor scooped with both palms, thumbs outward, perhaps an apology. He sat. He half somersaulted backward, over his kidneys. One knee, the other knee rose; his feet paddled. E-diet spasms folded him relentlessly. Priest glanced up. The junior had just recognized his danger, but he was unwilling to accept it, reluctant even while Priests fingers felt along his throat. The force of clenching split Priest’s swollen gloves. Leisurely, as a lover might, he drew the junior’s body down/onto his chest. The guardsman flailed at Priest’s ears, but the radius of his punching was constricted. Priest sighed. He pressed the open cheek against his own cheek; passion and release overcame disgust. Priest rolled the guardsman under and mounted him.
The capsule lay near his elbow. The man’s cheek gash was open, it shivered with breath, a gill. For several seconds the junior’s thumbs probed around Priest’s eyes, but Priest’s arms were much longer. Nails scraped rubber, then flesh from his fingers. Priest’s thighs detected a weakening under him. Knees crawled onto the man’s arms. Carefully, only left hand against windpipe, Priest picked up the capsule. As if turning a key, he pinched the guardsman’s nostrils. Teeth opened with a gush inhale, but they gritted closed when Priest moved his right hand down/away from the nose. Priest considered. He let the man breathe; seemed to consult with him. They stared at each other. Fingers were tapping against his inner arm; Priest did not understand. Then he nodded. He leaned down. His pulpy lips settled over the man’s nose. He bit nostrils shut. The mouth opened. Priest stroked throat, Adam’s apple until the capsule had gone down. The guardsman’s fists pounded the floor. Open hands slapped the floor. Fingertips stroked wood. Then stopped.
The First Monitor had witnessed it. Priest stood over him. He was helpless, body cradled by the spasms, rocking gendy. Hands were crossed over his mouth: a stereotype of horror. Priest peeled one hand away, then the other; kneed their palms flat. He fished the child’s capsule from his breast pocket. But the guardsman was adamant: his jaws would not open. He seethed air through clenching teeth when Priest shut his nose. Priest found the heavy aerosol can. Without anger, yet insistently, for he was in a hurry now. Priest hammered until the four front teeth had broken away.
Chapter 6
Priest dreamed that he was killing Mary. She gave imperturbable birth under him. He rode. His hands flopped on their wrists, stifling pillows. Mary inhaled suffocation as though it were perfumes. Her head unnecked, rolling free of her torso, yo-yoed up/back. It gave splinters. He hurt. Priest knew she was in labor; he hurried the business. Mary’s lips reasoned, but he heard no sound. Reluctantly, then, Priest turned her nose off, and it was an old iron faucet: he screwed tight, flakes of bloody rust broke away, her cheeks filled with breath. He shouted, “You’re a coward! You’re a coward!” The face was two-dimensional, a sheet of mask. He pulled from the right ear, tore it off, tore it off, calendar pages, and the face changed, a smile, a grimace, despair, shame, lust, laughter. But her fecund body was not killed. Enormously, with squeaking release, it was extruded to the waist. A girl. Her face was cauled by strips of rubber.
Priest awoke. Two-by-fours of late-morning sunlight slanted down from a small upper window, half open. He lay in a kind of cellar. Priest smelled humus: its deep rot suggested food. The walls were damp, chalked with lichen clots of efflorescence. He pushed to his knees. He ached; he was shivering. Opposite, brace for the planks of sunlight, a brass handle nosed from the wall. He saw other brass handles, each centering a square of marble; carved inscriptions were above. Priest tried to stand. His tongue used up all oral room: he could swallow without gagging only when he held it down with his forefinger. There was a stubble of festering stings on his neck and forehead, second growth under his beard. He tried to tweeze them out, but fingerpads had swollen against their nails. He was running a temperature. Priest searched across the floor for hood and mask, for his sandal. Then he remembered.
Priest had crushed her chest. He had trampled the child’s ribs over her heart. Now, as he remembered. Priest began to squat. His arms dangled over the cement floor; he drummed fists against his shins, rhythms of sullen, autistic reproach from childhood. The guardsmen had intercepted her, administered a capsule before following him into the hangar. Delirious, Priest’s mind had inverted actor and victim. He had paused from exhaustion, kicked again, as though packing her into the soil: pauses that made his act seem premeditated and heinous. Then Priest had limped away from Route 17, into retentive, brittle underbrush. He recalled stumbling once, being suspended above the ground in a basket of low brachiate growth, swung there by the whole forest’s natural motion. He did not remember climbing into this room; the one window was certainly too high. Yet there were footprints of a biped in the dust: one exact rubber sole, one shapeless, whisking blur. It was a long room, a rectangle. At the far end, lower steps of a spiral staircase turned upward in wedges. Priest crossed to the wall of handles. He was in a crypt. He read: not one of the dead had been alive a hundred years before. Two brooms leaned, disrespectful, ag
ainst an island sarcophagus. There was wax on the brass. Priest touched, then flung his hand away. He stumbled back, slapped palms over both ears. For a moment, wavering, he watched the window, watched the staircase. He removed his palms and heard it again: music, whistling. Dumbfounded, Priest held his fingertips together, as if prayerful, until he knew that the sounds were outside his mind. He approached the staircase, swinging from handle to handle. The music was sophisticated. It gave Priest a feeling of madness and thirst. Quietly, on all fours, he climbed the staircase.
The door was ajar. Drafts from the crypt held it open against a weak spring. Priest guessed that this had been a Christian church. The pews were gone: herringbones of wood remained set in the parquet floor. There were a few colored-glass facets on the window leading: at one place a saint’s disembodied shins. Columns walked, legs of tall wading birds, along the side aisles. Priest looked up, his elbows on the landing. The arched Gothic ceiling surprised him: he thought of a tent pavilion he had built, four poles and a canvas sheet, blown upward by the wind. Priest pushed the door open. He heard the whistling and there were new dimensions to its tone, echoes. He crept forward, then rose to knees, left hand supporting on the door knob. He glanced toward the half-turret apse. It had no furniture. Soot thumbs reached up, escaping through the broken rose window, ghosts of a conflagration. Priest saw the man.
He was tall. Priest watched him walk toward the apse with big, efficient strides; but there was constraint, too, in the movement. Elbows jutted back; they didn’t shift left/right to answer legs’ rhythm. His hair was white: it was drifted and crazy. An apron of scalp domed into it. He had an insect suit on, the hood and mask not attached. He was whistling: the sound deepened, thinned, as it rode bowls and rims of the ceiling. Beneath the chancel arch he knelt, sank abruptly below Priest’s vision. The whistling unraveled, then stopped. Priest watched for at least ten minutes. He hoped to hear the music again. The man stood: his right forefinger poked forehead, sternum, left pap, right pap. He began loping toward the crypt door. Priest was slow. He scuttled back, stood with one foot on the top stair, waiting for the man to pass. His hand, as it fingered along the brick pointing, scissored a sixfoot wooden pole slanted there. Priest hefted it. The whistling began again: Priest could judge the man’s progress by it. He was passing then. The door hinges yelped.
The man’s height astounded Priest. For an instant. Priest supposed the difference was in him, that his own body had somehow been diminished. Priest had never seen a man that tall. The pole was unwieldy coming out: it clacked on two sides of the door jamb. The man’s lips were still puckered; the silent whistle served as a moue of surprise. He retreated two steps before Priest thrust. The window pole’s iron tip, curled in a beckoning finger, struck, then penetrated his antagonist’s chest. It had probed just under the armpit. Priest’s weight, set forward in expectation of a good impact, carried him headlong across the chill parquet floor. He rose to one knee. The man observed him with interest. Priest lifted the window pole. Gently, apologetically, the man trod on its metal tip. Priest wrenched to uproot the clumsy weapon, seemed to crowbar under his opponent’s foot. They watched each other. The man shook his head, shrugged. Priest sat awkwardly on his buttocks.
The man settled to his knees; movement was segmented. Priest guessed that he wore a kind of brace. He was very old. His nose had been broken and rebroken: it seemed a flat burrow; nesting animals huddled perhaps under the bridge. Wrinkles graduated his forehead horizontally up to the taut scalp. His eyes were fine, blue; they looked through sparkling layers of rheum. He grasped Priest’s arm, tapped there. Priest formed ungainly words. The man was amused. He mouthed fluently.
“You’re a mess, my friend. Don’t tell me—yes…I see the stings. They did a good job on you. I’ve watched them swarming. They killed a dog last week. Stand up. I can’t bend very well.” Priest rose. “You’re a big bugger, aren’t you? Been a while since anyone’s head came above my shoulder. I’ve been shrinking, but seems like the world’s been shrinking faster. Can you read my lips?” Priest nodded irritably. “You wanted to kill me.” The man smiled. “Yes. But you were too beat up to do it. I was lucky. Don’t talk. Come into the light.”
He faced Priest toward a window. Deliberately, with eyes close, the old man snipped over Priest’s forehead with thumb and fingernail. Priest saw that his skin was weathered, but no yellows undertinged the bronze. Eye whites, too, had not jaundiced. As he concentrated, the upper lip ebbed, tucked atop gums. A fuzzed, oily tartar shod each tooth. His breath stank; the odor troubled Priest. Two large upper incisors were worn and translucent.
“Damn. Never get all these things out. What? Speak slowly. Your mouth is a bloody mush.”
“What is this place?”
“A church. You know what that is? Was?” Priest nodded. “Hold still. I’m a priest. A priest, I said.” He repeated it, for Priest had frowned: he thought the old man knew his surname. “Last one in the world, I think.”
“Why did you whistle? It is against the law.”
“You’re hearing things, friend. Bees in the ear.”
“No.”
“Yes. You’re hearing things. Believe me. Come in my office; I have something to draw the stings out. And you need medicine for the fever. Hundred two, hundred three at least. I’m surprised you’re still alive.”
It was a spacious chamber, wonderfully sunlit. Priest, febrile, imagined he was in a child’s kaleidoscope, slowly turning with it. One wall had been wholly screened; a roofless overgrown veranda deck extended outside. Insects covered the mesh: June bugs, hundreds of powdered green /white gypsy moths. They tottered under their wings, taxiing aircraft, and early sunlight projected the triangle shapes, exaggerated them, on the whitewashed wall opposite. By agreement they moved in a great clockwise circle; the room appeared to rotate. Five chairs, semicircling, paid attention to the old man’s burly desk, a swivel chair behind it: the record of some adjourned meeting. He gestured, left the room. Priest sat. Above, an ingeniously built punkah had been suspended from the ceiling—a yard-square slab of plywood, its energy given by a pedal under the desk. Both walls perpendicular to the screen were bookshelved. Priest saw a table crowded with empty liquor and wine bottles; one decanter of stale, dead-green E-diet. Priest presumed his hunger, did not yet feel it. He was weak. Black granules seasoned the desk top. They pulverized quickly under his thumb. Priest thought, improbably, that these were ashes. The old man returned with a jar of white salve. Rusty oils separated in it, surfaced. He homogenized the salve with a screwdriver shaft, then pulled the swivel chair forward. They sat knee to knee. He anointed Priest’s face and neck, his hands.
“What is your name?”
“Priest.”
“No. Watch my lips. What is your name?”
“My name is Priest. Dominick Priest.”
“Ah?” It was almost articulated. “Is that so? A priest in name only. Two of us. Let’s see if we can raise your shirt.” The old man rolled fabric up/under Priest’s armpits. Gooseflesh stippled skin as it bared. “My name is Paul. Xavier Paul.” Priest shook his head. The X sound was unfamiliar. “You can read?”
“Yes.” The old man wrote it. “X-avier. Xavier.”
“Priest, look…I’m leaving here; I was on my way when you came. I’m going north to the mountains. You’re welcome to stay here until the end.”
“No. I am going north. I have a wife and child. I walked three days. Sometimes I have crawled.” He locked fingers under his right knee: lifted to show the ankle. “I need food.” Priest pointed at the E-diet decanter.
“That’s stale.” Xavier Paul grinned. “Anyway—can’t fool me that easy. You don’t drink E-diet.”
“I don’t? But there is nothing else.”
“Your skin is nearly white. Look at that frog’s belly.” He thumbed up Priest’s eyelid. “Your pupils haven’t dilated. Tell me the truth.”
“Once in three days. That’s all. I don’t like the stomach pain. I don’t like the drug.
I have to do things. I have to go home.”
“Well—”
“And your skin is white too.”
“Well—” Xavier Paul hesitated. “I’ll get something for your ankle. I have an old pair of galoshes we could slit. You need a mask and hood. How far are you going?”
“New Loch.”
“New Loch?” He laughed: there was sound in the gush of breath. “That’s a good thirty miles from here. You’ll never make it before the last day.”
“I will make it.” Priest stood abruptly. “Sit down. Listen to me. There’s no articulation left in that ankle.”
“I don’t feel pain.”
“I didn’t say pain—” He gasped. Priest had stamped the right heel. He stamped again. The purple flesh whitened. “Stop it. Are you crazy?”
“I can walk. I have walked from New York City in three days. I don’t feel the pain. I don’t need my ankle in the grave.”
“No. That’s true. It’s a special time, kind of.”
“Let me go now.”
“Wait. Sit down. I’m not trying to hold you here.” He tapped two yellow pills into his palm. “Take these. They’re an antibiotic. Medicine. Worth gold on the black market thirty years ago. I’m not sure if they’re good now. They helped me two or three years back. I’ve kept them sealed in wax.”