Watson, Ian - Novel 10

by Deathhunter (v1. 1)

  ‘If he needs that to browbeat me,’ thought Jim, ‘then he can’t quite manage it by himself.’

  But Alice Huron was there too, sitting straight and tall, as well as Mary-Ann Sczepanski who seemed nervously intoxicated by the black, fire-flecked clouds. For the moment the etiquette of privacy and confidentiality had disappeared somewhere behind those plumes of smoke.

  “What exactly did you mean when you said that, eh? And now that it’s the morning after, how do you assess what happened?”

  Jim considered.

  Up in his room, Weinberger had not slept a wink all night. How could you get to sleep when your hand was being tortured? Jim doubted whether Weinberger could let go now, if he wanted to. His hand, and Death, were too intermixed: hooks trapped in bones, bones trapping wings. If, indeed, he was holding anything . . .

  But Weinberger knew that he was holding something. His hand remained bent like an arthritis victim’s, quite unable to flex. Yet to all outward appearances it was a perfectly unblemished hand. He did not sleep. He could not rest. He gritted his teeth, and held Death at arm’s length.

  “I believed I saw Death,” said Jim defiantly. “It was like a bat. It was like a huge moth, though there was nothing flimsy about it! It had big crystal eyes. It was red — with a kind of redness, anyway. Maybe it was infrared.”

  “So now you can see in the infrared?” asked Alice Huron sarcastically. “Maybe that explains why those cameras saw nothing!”

  This was true. When the videotapes were played back they had merely showed Weinberger jerking upright when he was injected, then scrabbling at the empty air for a minute or so — all on his own. Admittedly the record was confused by all the multiple images of Weinberger in the mirrors, but certainly no other creature was visible.

  “It didn’t register,” agreed Jim. “Yes, it’s exactly as though the tapes couldn’t record light of the wavelength I saw. It’s as though it came from a different spectrum entirely! But I swear that my eyes saw it.”

  “You hallucinated,” said Resnick, still arcing about. “You hypnotised yourself by staring through that periscope into all those mirrors. Your attention drifted. You were almost in a state of sensory deprivation — and you know where those can lead! What was his name, eh? Mike Mullen, hmm? Your friend. According to your dossier —”

  “Thank you for acquainting everybody with my dossier!”

  “Necessary information, Jim! In case you don’t realize it, we’re in trouble. First the murder, now this. If this fantasy gets out. . .! But it won’t, will it, Jim?”

  “If you put Weinberger on public exhibition, it may.”

  “And we must do that — though I do take grave exception to the word ‘exhibition’. Do you think you have us in a cleft stick, then?” Resnick danced from side to side as though to dislodge himself. “Let me remind you that in certain extreme circumstances a guide can be required to retire prematurely. If you follow me . . .”

  “Oh, I do.” Jim looked from Resnick’s face to those of his accomplices of the stormy night at the chalet. His minions . . . Mary-Ann smiled automatically at the mention of retirement.

  “All right, so Weinberger didn’t Find peace in his ‘machine’,” said Jim angrily. “But damn it, he’s begun to purge his hostile feelings about death. That’s what happened — don’t you see? They’re something he can seize hold of now. That’s a darn good start.”

  “And what about your own hostile feelings about death?” asked Alice. “Since you’re so positive that you saw the thing too!”

  “Hostile —? What bloody nonsense! Just give me time with the man! Anyway, it isn’t your job to decide.”

  Though who really did pull whose strings around this House?

  “Maybe I developed a sort of quasi-telepathic linkage with Nathan,” he admitted. “As a true guide should.”

  “With you in a state of sensory deprivation, that’s understandable,” said Resnick, in a more mellow tone. “You hallucinated, freely and grandiosely, when Weinberger sat up and began his phantom battle. You filled in the empty space in his hands. You gave it unreal life. So did Weinberger. He was torn out of deep trance by those stimulants. The blood was pounding through his heart valves, and probably through his eyeballs too. He saw that blood personalised.”

  ‘I couldn’t have hypnotised myself,’ thought Jim. ‘I knew the risk. I looked away from time to time.’

  “I do wonder,” said Alice, “why Jim should have filled in the empty space with that in particular. That bat or fighting cock or whatever it was.”

  Or whatever: bat, rooster, moth — none of these, really. Or all of them. An alien composite, a creature not of Earth.

  “Quasi-telepathy?” repeated Jim vaguely.

  “It occurs to me,” said Mary-Ann, “that we’re all just assuming that you both saw the same thing.” She sounded eager to help. “Okay, so it was a very powerful experience for you both, and you both saw something. But was it necessarily the same something? Was it the same experience? Have you asked Weinberger exactly what he saw?”

  And Jim realized that he had not.

  Because the event had been so very vivid, and because Nathan’s clutchings had synchronised so perfectly with what he himself saw, he had indeed leapt to the conclusion that the thing that Weinberger saw himself fighting with, and the thing that Jim saw him fighting with, were one and the same.

  Jim cursed himself silently, without letting any of the chagrin he felt show on his face.

  He decided to lie. They must have seen the same thing. Otherwise, Jim’s own private image of death — a secret even to himself, apparently! — was crazy and irresponsible. It was utterly childish.

  Mary-Ann was not really being helpful, he decided. But she was eager enough: eager for him to fall into the trap of admitting his oversight, and so lay himself open to the charge of harbouring feelings which he was certain he did not possess, emotions which were the opposite of what any true guide should feel, if he admitted the truth, he might as well resign here and now — if indeed the House allowed him simply to resign without at the same time demanding his premature retirement. As they could so demand. As they could.

  “Of course I asked him,” said Jim, hoping that no one else had asked Weinberger in the meantime. “We both saw the same thing.”

  “A case of powerful identification, then,” said Resnick, reeling in the line just at the instant when the fish had been about to bite. “I agree that that’s a fine thing in a guide — though in this case it does seem a little excessive. Okay, we’re tolerant people here in Egremont. We always could afford to be, with Norman Harper at the heart of our society. Could afford to be, Jim. Past tense. Could.”

  “Weinberger experienced catharsis,” said Jim, feeling more sure of his ground. “The hostile feelings have burst out of him, like an actual physical creature. As soon as he can let go of it, he’ll be free of those feelings. Permanently.”

  “He only has to be free of them for the next few weeks,” said Resnick. “I suggest that you go and hold his hand, till he opens it.” The Master glanced at Alice Huron, who had leant forward as though about to say something. “We’re in too deep to consider changing guides again. The bob-sled’s half-way down the run.” This sounded like a quotation from one of Norman Harper’s poems.

  Resnick bent to fiddle with a touch-pad behind his desk. The smoking volcano which had been looming over their discussion disappeared. In its place was a serene snow-clad mountain. All the inner fires and fumes and gobbets of lava were frozen by white Winter — the Winter of the world.

  Jim left the office, aware that his own life was in a real sense beginning to depend upon Weinberger’s good death.

  Up in room 302 Nathan Weinberger lay slumped in bed, kept awake by pain. His clenched hand rested on a bolster to keep it from contact with the sheets.

  How long could he succeed in holding Death at arm’s length? When Death escaped from him at last, would it wing elsewhere — or would it come straight to this
room? Would it home in, and perch on the real hand whose mirror image at present held it at bay, captive in the realm of reflections? Jim wondered whether the pain allowed Weinberger much leeway for such speculations.

  “My bones are coming apart,” groaned Weinberger. “It feels as though they are! Maybe they aren’t at all. This hand’s still solid. Oh my too too solid flesh! But I can’t see those other bones. I can only feel them. Oh hell, what I feel.”

  “Let go of it. Open your hand.”

  “I can’t, Jim. I can’t.”

  Jim leaned over Weinberger.

  “We both did see the same thing, didn’t we?” he whispered. “It was red, an unearthly red. It looked like a huge moth, or a bat — both at once. You did see that? That is what you’re holding on to now?”

  “Damn right it is!” Incongruously — confidingly — Weinberger winked. Or maybe the man’s eye had developed a twitch. “Never fear, Jim — I shan’t let you down.”

  “You’ll let go,” Jim promised. “You will.”

  “Ah, but will you let go?” Weinberger asked him roughly.

  Jim had no answer to this but to shake his head.

  “You believe me now, don’t you?”

  “I saw what I saw.”

  TWELVE

  Evening came, and Weinberger had still not let go of the invisible thing in his hand. To Jim’s surprise the sick man did not seem physically weaker. Rather, he seemed to be drawing strength from this prolonged bout of hand-wrestling with a hidden opponent.

  Plainly the situation could not continue. Surely Weinberger must soon burn up all his reserves. If his life became endangered — prematurely endangered, Jim reminded himself, since Weinberger was dying anyway — would an emergency amputation of his right hand be in order?

  It would be a castration, a cruel gelding of him.

  If he lost his grip that way — like some thief in the old Middle East who had tried to steal a jewel from the Sultan of Death — it would be a cheat. Probably it would solve nothing.

  Jim sat with Weinberger for an hour, his hand touching the other man’s limp left hand, then he went away to visit the farmer with multiple sclerosis. The farmer was looking forward increasingly to an early retirement as the only sane alternative to the inevitable withering away of his faculties which the disease would bring. ‘Don’t sigh, die high,' was the motto in his case. It was a Norman Harper motto.

  Jim returned to his own room at ten o’clock to catch some sleep, setting the alarm to rouse him at one in the morning.

  Most people’s bodily functions were at their lowest ebb around three o’clock in the morning. Three in the morning was the time when most deaths used to occur ‘naturally’ in the days before one could choose one’s time. Around three o’clock, therefore — most probably tonight — Jim suspected that some kind of crisis might occur . . .

  He let himself into Weinberger’s room at one-thirty.

  Weinberger lay awake, though his eyes were heavy and there seemed to be dark bruises under them. His hand was still clutched upon the bolster.

  After ensuring privacy, as usual, Jim sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I saw an. old movie years and years ago,” murmured Weinberger. “The movie was old, I was young. It wasn’t your modern sort of movie. It had killing and torture in it.”

  “Didn’t they all?”

  “It took place in some desert, during some war or other . . .

  “It was all one war, with different faces,

  A carousel war, in different places,

  Turning, turning, burning, burning,

  Returning . . .

  “Shit poet, you know, Norman Harper. Oh what have we come to? Anyway, the Arabs caught this man and tortured him. They tied him in a chair and ground his wrist bones back and forth with metal punishers.”

  “You remember that image especially?”

  “Oh, it hasn’t suggested anything, if that’s what you think! No, I just feel like that fellow in the chair. Only, I don’t have any secret to confess. So the pain can’t stop. The torture just goes on and on.”

  “There is a secret, Nathan. The secret is peace. Acceptance and unity. Fulfilment and completion.”

  “When my hand’s being screwed? Screw that!”

  “It’ll stop, as soon as you let it stop.”

  “Lame, Jim, lame. You saw Death too.”

  “But Death shouldn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t complain, there is no pain When life’s fulfilment you attain.”

  This time Jim couldn’t tell whether Weinberger was quoting the murdered poet or parodying him.

  They sat in silence for a long time, their fingers touching, watching the icebergs in the wall.

  Occasionally Jim glanced covertly at his watch. He always wore the watch with its face on the underside of his wrist so as not to offend clients by checking the time ostentatiously. For the same reason he favoured an old-style watch with hands rather than an electronic one.

  Two-fifteen.

  Two-thirty . . .

  Perhaps Weinberger would simply fall asleep at three o’clock. Outside, the House was hushed. It seemed hours since Jim had heard a sound of any sort. Not even the duet of their breathing was audible. Jim blinked, wishing that he had had the foresight to take a stimulant.

  At a quarter to three Weinberger suddenly cried out like a woman in childbirth. His eyes goggled. Both his hands flexed, the fingers bending backward like an Asian dancing girl’s. For just a moment Jim thought that the man had died, and his hand jerked towards the phone to call for a resuscitation unit.

  But then Weinberger brought both hands together with a sharp clean smack.

  “It’s gone!” he cried. “It’s damn well gone! Death’s gone! Given up! Let go! Got away!” He pounded his hands together again and again.

  And fell asleep, a moment later. Soundly asleep.

  Jim checked the man’s pulse and breathing. Both were fine. He reached for the phone again, to order the spy camera switched back on, but stopped himself in time. Nothing, but nothing, should disturb Weinberger while sleep healed his self-inflicted, phantom scars. Not a word, not a whisper. He would phone from his own rooms, instead.

  He tiptoed out, locked the door silently and headed for the elevator.

  It was with a huge feeling of relief and release that Jim climbed into bed.

  Now that he was persona grata again, he wished he could share that sense of release, and his bed, with someone. But it was far too late, and besides, who was quite to be trusted? Maybe Marta Bettijohn was. Or perhaps he could apologize to Sally Costello. But no, she was under Menotti *s wing, and operatic heroes could be jealous characters off-stage as well as on.

  Before he fell asleep, he decided that it was time for that promised dinner excursion to the Three Spires restaurant down Egremont Mall, with Marta.

  THIRTEEN

  Jim was dreaming of Marta. She was a Rubens woman, dressed in the skimpiest of lace streamers. These blew around her in the breeze, attached to little more than her nipples and the cleft of her sex — this was shaven and pink. Away from the chalet she skipped, in between the junipers; he pursued. The sky was monochrome, as were the trees and bushes. Yet Marta was rose-hued, and the sun was blood-red. Red, too, were the sails of yachts tacking on the lake. He gained on Marta. She beckoned him. They would act out the little death of orgasm on the shore.

  But then the sails of the yachts became the wings of great moths. These moths beat into the air. They fluttered towards Marta and descended all about her. The moths sipped from her with long hollow tongues . . . Then Jim realized that far from sipping they were pumping something into her. Instead of deflating, Marta swelled like a balloon, becoming larger and larger and less and less substantial till she was quite transparent. Whereupon she floated off into the sky. Even though he had no wings, Jim flew after her to pierce the balloon, to pop it . . .

  The trilling of the telephone woke him.

  He clutched for his watch. It was late morning
. He had forgotten to set his alarm, he had missed one appointment already and was late for the second one. Strange that no one had tried to rouse him till now.

  When he picked up the phone Marta’s voice spoke from the earpiece like an extension of his dream.

  “Jim, I thought I should warn you. Your client Weinberger has been creating a fine old stir this morning —’’

  “He should be asleep! He should be sacked out for hours yet.”

  “On the contrary, he’s remarkably energetic — I hear. Full of beans! Listen, Jim, he’s claiming there’s been a spontaneous remission of his illness. He says he’s completely cured.”

  “What? Cured of his cramp — I know that! And just maybe he’s cured of the mental complex that caused it. That is what you mean?”

  “It isn’t. Weinberger says that his cancer has all gone. Whoosh, just like that. He demanded a re-evaluation. Not a biopsy — he wouldn’t let himself be cut open. A thermogram would suit him fine: a hot spot picture.”

  “Oh dear. Well, a thermogram will merely show that he’s still riddled with cancer.”

  “Jim, I quite like you, so I should warn you —”

  (‘As you liked me, last night?’)

  “— Noel got very annoyed, and had Weinberger rushed over to the Hospital with an escort, tout de suite. They already took the heat profile an hour ago. So far as they can tell, the cancer has all mostly gone. Or it’s well on the way to going. They’re still arguing about the exact interpretation of the thermogram results. But apparently Weinberger is cured. Rather suddenly.”

  Jim collected his scattered wits.

  “A hysterical cure — is that it? Hysterical remission?”

  “But Jim, he already officially retired. What’s more, he’s still a murderer! So he has to go through with his retirement. How likely is it now that he’ll do it gracefully? The last time I saw Noel, he was lunging from side to side, shouting, ‘What do we do now? Starve him to death? Drug the bastard with conditioners? Everybody would know!’ The ball’s in your court, Jim. And oh boy, is it bouncing.” She hushed her voice, so that he could hardly hear her. “It’s as if he shot his own death into Norman — successfully. You know what that implies . . .