She shuddered and looked away from him. One of the crewmen in white had skin as black as Jude’s; she watched him pull in and coil a rope dangling from the dinghy hoist. In her mind’s eye she saw the boy’s limp arms and the blood on his head. She tried to force herself to believe that he was dead, that she could not hope to find him again. But the inner persuasion did not work; she knew she would look for him and that however slim the chance . . .
Ferret handed her a drink; this time she absent-mindedly took it and sipped from it. She realized suddenly that Ferret might take her action to be acquiescence; then it occurred to her that she truly did not give a damn what the man thought.
“I’m menacing by nature,” Ferret said off-handedly. “But surely you grasp the flattery behind it, Cable.”
“In a perverted sort of way,” she agreed. She noticed for the first time how unguarded she was. Big Bruno was leaning over the railing paying no attention whatever. One commando kept an eye on her, but he looked lazy and bored. The black crewman was preoccupied.
She turned her back on Ferret. This allowed her to lean over the railing and survey possible escape routes.
“I could do so much for you,” Ferret said, pushing close.
She saw a narrow channel intersecting the winding river they had been navigating; there was a little boat there, partially visible through the trees. It reminded her of Jude and his pole.
Ferret caressed her arm. “I could take you out of these dreary swamps and make you fabulously wealthy—if you’d tell me where you hid the notebook.”
“I like the swamps just fine,” said Cable. “It’s the slime that’s crawled out from under the rocks that turns my stomach.”
Ferret said, “Nasty mouth. But a pretty one.”
He gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him. His bony arms drew her in and he kissed her hard. She did not resist.
He released her gently, stroked her hair and said softly, “What do you say to that?”
She moved back a step. “Not much,” she answered. With a lightning move she kicked out into Ferret’s groin. As he doubled over with a horrendous scream of outrage and pain, she rushed him and gave him a hard shove backward. He went cartwheeling over the side.
Before Ferret hit the water, Cable had vaulted over the railing.
Bruno yelled “Hey!” And a sailor shouted for the captain to stop the ship.
Cable splashed in far from the side of the mist-making boat.
The commando was aiming his pistol when Ferret’s voice cut through the air from the water a hundred feet back: “No! She’s mine!”
Cable swam frantically until her hand hit the muck at the bottom; she scrambled to her feet, in plain sight for a second, and ran for the thick brambles on the bank.
This was a new kind of swamp—almost impassable. A net of thorn vines tangled in the bushes like cobwebs. Her arms quickly scratched and bleeding, she had no choice but to continue plowing through. The vines that were dead and dry rattled so that she could not hear sounds behind her; but she felt certain Ferret was there. She had caught a glimpse of him in the shallows, his machete flashing in the sunlight.
The roots at her feet were so numerous and intertwined that it was like running on a rigid pile of rain-warped lumber. She felt she was climbing horizontally.
She stopped to breathe and to listen. There were clicking sounds coming from everywhere. She looked at her feet. The ground was alive with thousands of tiny blood-red crabs, stampeding over the roots.
A sharper sound above; it was a huge lizard swishing through the low, matted branches. It stopped to look at her.
Another sound, not far behind her; someone was thrashing through the underbrush.
She pushed ahead, looking frantically for a clear path or some obstruction solid enough to hide behind.
There was a path of sorts, more of a stream in which trickled water dyed red by fallen leaves. She wheeled into it and stumbled, her ankle twisted, got to her feet and hobbled on. The stream seemed to reach a dead end; but she found that it turned under an overhang of branches and continued. She looked back as she turned with the stream. She still could not see Ferret, but from the careless noise he made she guessed he was near the start of the red stream.
She ran, looking down at the treacherous ground, straight into the chest of the swamp thing.
She screamed. The huge, gray-green bulk, the awful face, the flowing, golden eyes! Confused and terrified, Cable turned and ran away, unthinking, back toward Ferret.
At a sound from the thing, though, she realized the monster had not come running after her. She stopped at the branches where the stream turned and looked back at him.
He was holding out his hands to her. The gesture seemed to say: I mean no harm.
She was arrested by the sight. Light came from behind him—there had to be a clearing—and his silhouetted form seemed more colossal and omnipotent than ever. Yet it was not power he radiated; it was pleading.
His gash of a mouth opened. A sound came from him. The mouth moved again, in a face intent with effort. The sound came again. Then he said a single word. It was labored and of such resonance it seemed to come from another world:
“Cable.”
She was frozen. Goosebumps thrilled over her flesh and she grabbed a branch to steady herself; she felt faint. She stumbled a step backward.
At that instant Ferret burst out of the underbrush into the red stream. He could see Cable ahead; he could not see what stood in her path. The machete raised high, he lunged toward the branches at the curve in the stream.
Cable saw him, and recovered her senses, just as the machete fell. She dodged, and it whizzed past her ear, chopped completely through a branch, and lodged in a large root.
Ferret was so fierce that he was clumsy. He tugged the blade out of the wood and dived toward Cable again.
She ran the only way open to her: toward the monster that blended so with the vegetation around him that the rage-blinded Ferret had not seen him.
When she reached him, the great green thing raised an arm to protect her from Ferret.
Ferret saw the movement and realized what he faced. As much from sheer terror as from intent, he yelled and swung the machete with all his might. The blade caught that massive right arm just below the shoulder and severed it completely.
Cable backed into the clearing. It was small and almost walled in by incredibly dense vegetation. One break in the trees led to the river. She saw the hovercraft there not far away.
The creature roared in immense anger and pain.
Cable backed into a tree and held it for support. She saw the monster reach out a blindingly fast left arm and grasp Ferret’s head—his giant green hand covering the scalp, his powerful fingers falling over Ferret’s pallid face and ears.
Ferret screamed. The hideous sound was soul-quenching and final.
Cable saw Ferret’s headless body plop to the ground as the swamp thing backed toward her. The creature spun and hurled something dark and round toward the edge of the river.
There was a splash as if a cannonball had hit, and then a boil of armored snouts and tails as alligators discovered the unexpected treat.
Cable lost consciousness and slid down the tree to the ground.
Out in the river, Arcane had come to the deck of his hovercraft in time to hear Cable’s scream.
“There!” he pointed toward the shoreline thicket a hundred yards upstream. “Tell the captain to reverse the engines,” he instructed a sailor.
Bruno was shielding his eyes Indian-fashion and peering into the swamp beyond the bright river water. “I hope he didn’t kill her,” Bruno said to Arcane.
“I rather hope so, too, Bruno,” he said. “Ferret knows better, of course, but there are times, for men like Ferret, when what he knows is simply not accessible to his brain. Let’s hope that he merely incapacitates the lady, so we’ll have no more worries about escapes.”
“He’s crazy, isn’t he?” Bruno asked.
> “Ferret? I expect so,” Arcane said indifferently.
The boat—which had been drifting—powered up slightly, its muffled engines rumbling, water hissing up as mist from the air cushion; and it began to float very slowly back upstream.
They heard Ferret’s animal growl even above the boat sounds.
Arcane laughed. “Well, he hasn’t killed her yet. He’s still doing his terrify-them-into-submission routine.”
“He’ll give her a heart attack.”
Arcane called the black sailor over and instructed him: “Get ready to lower the dinghy to pick up Ferret and the girl.”
“Yes, sir,” the sailor said with a nod.
Ferret hollered again, but this time something sounded not quite right about it.
Almost immediately the air shook with the terrible familiar roar of the monster.
“Jesus,” Bruno said, pale, “it’s that swamp thing!”
“Look there!” Arcane said, pointing. “Isn’t that the girl?”
In a small clearing, Cable backed into a tree and steadied herself against it.
The monster—still not in sight—emitted a low rumble that was audible over the sounds of the boat and the swamp; it was followed by Ferret’s even louder, terrified howl.
Then there was silence.
The girl sank to the ground.
A ball flew out of the thicket and splashed into the water not far from the shore.
Alligators fought over it.
Bruno shouted, “Ferret!?”
There was no answer. Just the sounds of the gators feeding.
“Maybe we should go in and check,” said Bruno; “pick up the girl?”
Arcane shook his head. “We’ll go home now.”
Bruno had never seen Arcane so shaken. “But sir, Ferret might be hurt.”
Arcane signaled to the sailor not to bother lowering the dinghy.
“Do you remember radio dramas, Bruno? No, I suppose not. They were quite wonderful. Just sounds. And in your mind all the pictures formed while you listened. Didn’t any pictures form for you just now?”
Bruno shook his head. “Shouldn’t we check on Ferret? If he’s hurt he might not make it back.”
“I think,” Arcane said looking even more pale, “that our friend Ferret finally . . . lost his head.”
“You think that thing killed him?”
Arcane nodded.
“Shouldn’t we go kill that thing?”
“I still want him alive. The girl, too, for that matter.”
“Well—?”
“Tomorrow is another day, Bruno. Besides, I suspect now that we’ll need stronger nets. Go tell the captain to take us home.” He added, “We’ll keep our electronic eyes on the swamp, never fear.”
22
Cable drifted back to consciousness slowly. She was cool and damp. Disoriented, she wondered hazily what might be wrong with her air conditioner, why her bed should be lumpy, what had happened to the sound of traffic in the streets of Washington—a sound that never completely quit. It must have been about time for the alarm to go off. The breeze . . . was a window left open? That odor of flowers . . . where was that coming from? She thought of cherry blossoms around the national monuments, snow melting.
“How much do you know about artificially induced bio-regenerative activity in plants, Cable? How about laboratory techniques for processing data from organic tests by computer?” asked a kindly white-haired man framed by a window overlooking the library of Congress.
“What a layman can know about gene splicing, work with DNA,” she replied; “and almost all anybody knows about data processing for scientific installations in general.”
“Ever heard of Dr. Alec Holland?” he asked, lighting a cigar.
Cable felt a fly on her nose and blindly shooed it away. She heard another noise that sounded, in her twilight state, like an enormous fly. She imagined that was what it was, and that it was diving toward her.
The fly became an airboat. She stirred; her body jerked with hypothetical fear. The sound dwindled, faded into a distant locust and a bullfrog.
The bed under her, she realized, was a bed of moss—damp moss—and the lumps were in the tree she leaned against. Her eyes drifted open.
It was the most beautiful spot she had ever seen. The cypresses were like those that had lined the channel she had traveled with Jude, only these trees were taller, more majestic. All of their energies had gone into manufacturing leaves for the thick canopy above; there were very few low branches or leaves. She was in a domed cathedral. The air was more fragrant than any she had ever smelled. Gardenias grew wild among the cypresses, and blooming trumpet vines and orchids stretched up the trunks to reach the sun.
Hundreds of silent butterflies visited the millions of blossoms.
Looking up, Cable noticed that the spokes of sunshine came through tiny holes above at quite an angle; it was late.
That was well and good; it was time to sleep. Still dazed, her mind and body fatigued in the extreme. Cable drank in her surroundings and found them comforting. It was beautiful; that was nice.
She let her eyes drift shut again. It felt as if someone caressed her forehead, touched her hair. That was nice, too.
“Hi,” she said to a handsome light-haired man in lab coat and sneakers, “lose a contact lens?”
“Funny,” he said.
An orchid grew out of his hand; it branched and exploded into flower as roots coiled around his naked arm. Up and up like Jack’s beanstalk grew the orchid. It became a tree touching the clouds. Rain dripped from it, and where the drops fell, green shoots pushed up out of the ground and snaked, growing like a time-lapse photo or a cartoon, into the air till they were a grove of saplings taller than Cable.
Alec leaned down from a high branch of the orchid tree and extended his hand: “Come up with me,” he said with a beautiful open smile. But his hand was on fire.
Something cracked into her skull and she fell to the floor of the church foyer. She heard shouts. A blaze swept past her; it screamed in horror and pain.
Her eyes popped open again. Her heart was racing. It surprised her that she was in the cathedral of cypresses she had dreamed about, that it was real, that the sun was really going down. A dozen rabbits hopped about on the moss, pulling up tender blades of grass.
The tree she leaned against moved.
But it couldn’t have! She sat bolt upright—weak, her head heavy.
Something small darted through the air near her head. She didn’t hear it until it was near; then she remembered the giant fly her dream had conjured. It was a hummingbird. It stopped suddenly in midair, like a helicopter, then darted to a huge orchid blossom.
The blossom was moving toward Cable, bringing the irridescent little bird with it. The orchid was in an Olympian mossy hand.
Cable jumped to her feet. She had been sleeping against the monster’s side, in the crook of its elbow! She remembered instantly what it had done to Ferret. Not that the man hadn’t deserved it—but the violence of the act was appalling, horrible.
Frightened, she backed away and tripped over a root. She fell awkwardly and sat there staring at him. His big amber eyes blinked. He sat cross-legged like one of those enormous Buddhas in Asian jungles—abandoned, overgrown with moss and vines, but infinitely tranquil and patient.
His only movement was to hold out the flower to her.
She stood and leaned over to take it. She said, as if talking to a brilliant ape or a giant two-year-old, “Very kind. Beautiful orchid.”
The monster looked back at her with great intensity.
Suddenly Cable remembered that it had spoken, that it had spoken her name!
She knelt in front of him, suddenly no longer frightened.
He was struggling once again to form words. The first attempt was a rumble, an “Uhhhh.” Then he said, “Family orchidaceae,” the great beast rumbled, every syllable an effort. It was obvious that he was learning to talk, and that he would succeed once he learned wha
t was physically required of him. “Genus . . . orchis,” he said. He stopped and smiled, as if proud of himself.
Cable’s mouth hung open in amazement and anticipation.
He went on, a little more ably, “Over . . . a hundred species . . . here. I told you.”
She was on her knees before him, holding the orchid to her breast with both hands, her eyes searching his face.
His eyes were watching her face as intently. “I told you . . . much beauty in the swamps . . . if only you . . . look.”
A dim ray of sunlight touched his face, gave his grim countenance a marvelous glow. Cable searched it for a likeness, but nothing identifying remained. Still—she knew. Her eyes brimmed over with tears, and after a moment of sharing his difficulty with speech, she muttered, “Alec.”
The monster stood, huge and naked. Not Alec at all. Cable gasped and sprang back.
But he made no move toward her; if anything, he shrank back to avoid startling her. He stood there, monumental in the late sunlight, and only waited. He did not look at her.
For the first time she noticed his right shoulder, where an arm should have been, where there was now a ragged stump at which hummingbirds were feeding. He waved his hand to scare them away.
Cable stepped toward him. She could hear his breathing; it was resonant, like that of a horse, big and mighty and wondrous. She touched his forearm. It was soft and hard at the same time, like moss on oak. The tendons that outlined and defined the muscles of his hand felt like grapevine. His breathing remained regal and steady.
She forced herself to look at his terrible wound. It was not like torn human flesh, nor was it like the wood of vegetable limbs; it was a blend of the two with the rough shapes of muscle and bone cut through and oozing a golden sap that attracted hummingbirds.
“I’m sorry,” said Cable with great compassion, “It must—”
“Hurt?” he said easily.
“Yes. Does it? I mean, do you feel pain the same way?”
He considered her question. “Only when I laugh,” he said.
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