"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?' "
" 'I 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 him—with all those people acting like his characters and enjoying it so."
Render put down his cup and 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 split and shattered chalices, and the seas part to reveal stairways leading down, and arms emerge from caverns, waving torches that flame like liquid faces—a midwinter night's nightmare, summer go a-begging. Render know—for 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 sorcerors, bring them to trial for treason against the realm —aye, 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.
"Eileeni"
The willow swayed toward him, swayed away,
"Eileen! Come forth!"
Leaves fell, floated upon the lake, disturbed its mirrorlike 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 *hrough 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 plane 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 tree trunks, 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 to 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 cathe-dral, uttering a sonic boom. Render smiled at that, remembering now; it was like a slip of the tongue: for a moment he had confused EUeen with JiU—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 nickered 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 necklace—Where?"
"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 wails 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 nickers 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.
"1 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 Romanee-Conti stood on the white cloth beside a wide-brimmed 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 something—something 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 biceps 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 replied—within 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 He 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 cry—half-human, ali 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 North—Fern-is, son of Loki—raging at the heavens.
It leaped 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 pinnacles —under the edges of glaciers, beside frozen river beds, and always downwards—until its hot breath bathed him and its laughing mouth was opened above him.He turned then and his feet became two gleaming rivers carrying him away.
The world jumped backward. 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 ground—like strings of bubbles.
He approached the shattered form.
Like a swimmer he approached—unable to open his mouth to speak for fear of drowning—of drowning and not knowing, of never knowing.
He could not check his forward motion; he was swept tide-like 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-tobe-calendared occasions outside that sequence of elements called Time.
Render stood there and did not care if Fenris leaped 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, chomping through the steel, the glass, groping inside for .. .
"Nol 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, drippingand 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 Wedgewood. A single candle flickered upon their table, She held the glass to his lips. "Please drink it." "Yes, give it to mel"
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 bis 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. "Shaperi" 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 for—Rothman, yes, it was Rothman—the 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 head 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 Vemichtung," 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 moming, I told you it was impossible."
"Sir, I'm Repr
esentative Erikson—and 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 morning—the slopping, steaming bowl of the sea—he 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, flowed 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 tree trunk. He stared at the huge, bearded servitor who continued to speak, words harsh with barbaric accents:
"It cometh like a dark swan before the wind— returning."
"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! White!—Isolde! 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.
COMES NOW THE POWER
I wrote this story on one of the blackest days in my memory, a day of extreme wretchedness accompanied by an unusual burst of writing activity—which I encouraged, to keep from thinking about what was bothering me. I sat down and did three short stories, one after the other without leaving the typewriter. They were "Divine Madness," this one and "But Not the Herald." I later put the other two into my collection The Doors of His Face. The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (Donhteday's title—not mine; I had suggested Hearts & Flov/ers) and I would have included this one there, too, save that I could not locate a copy at the time I assembled the manuscript. I cannot be certain whether Peter De Vries' The Blood of the Lamb was on my mind then, just a little though I know I'd read it before that time.
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