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sound.
Too late for excuses,' he said, shaking his head.
'You came to me, remember? You want the drummer
stopped. Why else did you come?' His grip tightened
yet further. She had the sensation of her face swelling;
 The drummer was deafeningly loud now; though
Kavanagh's mouth still opened and closed she could
no longer hear what he was telling her. It mattered
little. She realised now that he was not Death; not the
clean-boned guardian she'd waited for. In her eagerness,
she had given herself into the hands of a common killer,
a street-corner Cain. She wanted to spit contempt at
him, but her consciousness was slipping, the room, the
lights, the face all throbbing to the drummer's beat. And
then it all stopped.
She looked down on the bed. Her body lay sprawled
across it. One desperate hand had clutched at the sheet,
and clutched still, though there was no life left in it. Her
tongue protruded, there was spittle on her blue lips. But
(as he had promised) there was no blood.
She hovered, her presence failing even to bring a
breeze to the cobwebs in this corner of the ceiling,
and watched while Kavanagh observed the rituals of
hi« crime. He was bending over the body, whispering
in its ear as he rearranged it on the tangled sheets. Then
he unbuttoned himself and unveiled that bone whose
inflammation was the sincerest form of flattery. What
followed was comical in its gracelessness; as her body
was comical, with its scars and its places where age
puckered and plucked at it. She watched his ungainly
thrust.
119
At last, he finished. There was no gasp, no cry. He
simply stopped his clockwork motion and climbed off
her, wiping himself with the edge of the sheet, and
buttoning himself up again.
Guides were calling her. She had journeys to make,
reunions to look forward to. But she did not want to
go; at least not yet. She steered the vehicle of her
spirit to a fresh vantage-point, where she could better
see Kavanagh's face. Her sight, or whatever sense this
condition granted her, saw clearly how his features were
painted over a groundwork of muscle, and how, beneath
that intricate scheme, the bones sheened. Ah, the bone.
He was not Death of course; and yet he was. He had the
face, hadn't he? And one day, given decay's blessing,
he'd show it. Such a pity that a scraping of flesh came
between it and the naked eye.
Come away, the voices insisted. She knew they could
not be fobbed off very much longer. Indeed there were
some amongst them she thought she knew. A moment,
she pleaded, only a moment more.
Kavanagh had finished his business at the murder-
scene. He checked his appearance in the wardrobe
moments in the state she had so recently achieved.
Only at the last was she rewarded for her vigil, as a
look she recognised crossed Kavanagh's face. Hunger!
The man was hungry. He would not die of the plague,
120
any more than she had. Its presence shone in him -
gave a fresh lustre to his skin, and a new insistence to
his belly.
He had come to her a minor murderer, and was going
from her as Death writ large. She laughed, seeing the
self-fulfilling prophecy she had unwittingly engineered.
For an instant his pace slowed, as if he might have heard
her. But no; it was the drummer he was listening for,
beating louder than ever in his ear and demanding, as
he went, a new and deadly vigour in his every step.
121
HOW SPOILERS
BLEED
LOCKE RAISED HIS eyes to the trees. The wind was
moving in them, and the commotion of their laden
branches sounded like the river in full spate. One imper-
sonation of many. When he had first come to the jungle
he had been awed by the sheer multiplicity of beast and
blossom, the relentless parade of life here. But he had
the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether.
See us now, he thought drunkenly as they stood around
Cherrick's grave, look at how we play the game too.
We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than
the dead themselves.
122
The corpse had been one scab by the time they'd
hoisted it into a sack and carried it outside to this
miserable plot behind Tetelman's house to bury. There
were half a dozen other graves here. All Europeans, to
judge by the names crudely burned into the wooden
crosses; killed by snakes, or heat, or longing.
Tetelman attempted to say a brief prayer in Spanish,
but the roar of the trees, and the din of birds making
their way home to their roosts before night came down,
all but drowned him out. He gave up eventually, and
they made their way back into the cooler interior
of the house, where Stumpf was sitting, drinking
brandy and staring inanely at the darkening stain on
the floorboards.
Outside, two of Tetelman's tamed Indians were
shovelling the rank jungle earth on top of Cherrick's
sack, eager to be done with the work and away
before nightfall. Locke watched from the window.
'Locke?'
Locke woke. In the darkness, a cigarette glowed.
As the smoker drew on it, and the tip burned more
intensely, Stumpf s wasted features swam up out of the
night.
'Locke? Are you awake?'
'What do you want?'
123
'I can't sleep,' the mask replied, 'I've been thinking.
The supply plane comes in from Santarem the day after
tomorrow. We could be back there in a few hours. Out
of all this.'
'Sure.'
'I mean permanently,' Stumpf said. 'Away.'
'Permanently?'
Stumpf lit another cigarette from the embers of his last
before saying, 'I don't believe in curses. Don't think I
do.'
'Who said anything about curses?'
'You saw Cherrick's body. What happened to
him . . .' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]