The Gods Look Down (8 page)

‘Is the VTR running?' Dagon inquired.

Milton Blake nodded, his eyes fixed on the screen. One of the technicians said, ‘Something's happening to him.' His voice was uncertain as though he had been caught off-balance.

Blake looked quickly through the angled observation window. He felt as jumpy as a cat. ‘What is it? What's wrong?'

The other technician said, ‘My God.'

‘
What is it
?'

‘His hands,' the technician said. ‘You can see through his hands. You can see the bones—'

Dr Francis Dagon craned his neck forward, looking down intently into the transmission area. ‘The man's skull is visible,' he remarked. ‘His flesh is becoming transparent.'

Blake said through the talk-back, ‘Watch those readings. Report immediately any fluctuations outside the norm. What's the adrenal level?'

‘510.'

‘An interesting physiological condition,' said Dagon, craning forward. ‘Has it happened with any of your other patients?'

Blake was about to reply when the display came to life: an image had appeared in three-dimensional colour. He said through the talk-back, ‘We have something.'

‘I don't like this,' one of the technicians said.

Dagon turned to Blake and said conversationally, ‘He seems to be having a fit. Is this normal?'

The patient's head was thrown back so that the transparent musculature of his neck was visible. There was foam on his lips and his eyes were now open, the eyeballs upturned into the head, white and blindly staring. His limbs were rigid, jerking stiffly as spasms of uncontrollable energy passed through them like bursts of electrical current. The face and hands were now completely translucent, displaying the bones, muscles and blood vessels within.

Both technicians were staring anxiously towards the observation room. Blake said, ‘Watch those levels. Report any deviations outside the safety parameters.'

‘Is he all right do you suppose?' Dagon asked, relighting his cigar. ‘Will we have to abort the experiment?' His interest seemed purely academic.

Blake adjusted the controls on the display and brought the image into fine focus. ‘I hope all this is worth it.'

‘Are we to proceed?' Dr Francis Dagon said with faint surprise.

Blake took out his handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands. ‘You wanted mythic projection and that's what you've got,' he said, and then through the talk-back, ‘We're on vision and recording. Watch those levels.'

The whip lashed home seven times, lacerating the flesh with seven neat slices. The crowd in the market-place, who had nothing better to do than gawp, cackled and snorted and spat into the baked red earth.

‘Give ‘im one for luck!' somebody shouted in a cheery cracked voice and the crowd laughed and stamped its feet in agreement.

‘Seven is the penalty and seven's been paid,' said the town clerk officiously. He turned his head and mumbled over his shoulder, ‘Throw him down. Let the dogs at him.'

He was flung into the dust, an idiot-child of a man with a misshapen head and red drooling lips, and the town dogs gathered round and licked his raw back. One shoulder was hunched, the protruding shoulder-blade showing bleak and white like an embryonic wing. That side of his body, the left, had been devastated by a stroke and both the hand and the leg were at odds with their counterparts.

Somebody kicked at him pettishly (a man who had lain awake all night suffering from haemorrhoids) but he hardly felt it through the hot clawing fury of pain which seared his back. The dogs snuffled and licked greedily, relishing the warm salty tang of fresh blood. Because of the half-formed ‘wing' he was known derisively as Angel, and now somebody called his name in a soft undertone. When he didn't respond the girl came closer, repeating his name in the same gentle tone. She was dressed in a cloak and hood which kept her face hidden so that only a suggestion of her features was visible to the curious onlooker.

‘Get up, Angel, the dogs are getting a taste for you,' and she kicked the scrawny animals away, indifferent to their yelps and squeals.

The man struggled to his knees and with the girl's support managed to stand upright. Even with his hunched deformity he was taller than her by half a metre, a tower of a man alongside her slender insubstantial figure. He pulled the tattered scraps of the rough shirt together across his crooked shoulders and followed the girl to where a tired-looking horse waited stoically between the shafts of a farm cart. She didn't try to help him but merely stood watching as he hauled himself up on to the back of the cart and lay face down in the straw. The flesh of his back was raised up in an ugly welter of puffy stripes, the seven merging into each other. The girl climbed up and with a pointed stick spurred the nag into lurching motion.

‘Don't get the idea you have been rescued, Angel,' Meria ben Shem Tov said above the creaking of wheels, jabbing at the horse's withered flanks. ‘You have yet to settle with my father and he too will want his pound of flesh.'

*

The house of black sandstone, once the residence of a lord and landowner, stood on a gentle slope which, at the rear, fell away precipitously to a deep ravine where goats grazed on the scrubby vegetation. The single rutted track wound upwards through clumps of knarled olive trees and dense thickets of bougainvilia, their flowers vivid blotches of dark purple against the parched earth. The horse barely made the shallow incline and had to be encouraged a number of times by means of the specially pointed stick, eventually collapsing to a halt in the small paved courtyard surrounded by a wall constructed in the ornamental Moorish style.

Meria ben Shem Tov threw back her hood and stepped down, ignoring the pathetic animal which sagged between the shafts, and told the man to go at once into the house. Her colour was high and her eyes fierce and dark above the sharp prominence of a nose which threatened to dominate her face: her features were strong and emphatic, in keeping with a character that was forthright, self-assertive, almost brutal in its disregard for the feelings of others. She was not yet twenty and already a fearsome woman who knew her own mind and wanted her own way; she was seldom denied it.

In the great hall, beneath the large framed portraits darkened by woodsmoke, the stooping lame-shouldered giant called
Angel stood before the master of the house, a small thin man with large expressive eyes and pale delicate hands. He was physically unremarkable, except perhaps that his head was fractionally too large for his body; his manner was discreet, his gestures constrained and unemotional. Dagon ben Shem Tov spoke in a soft disinterested voice, though a spark of anger resided in his dark eyes. As his daughter removed her cloak and draped it across a chair he asked, ‘What's the cretin been up to this time? Did he receive the lash for stealing?'

Meria brushed the tousled black hair away from her forehead. ‘He was found playing with the children. You know what the townspeople are like, they jump at their own shadows.'

‘Did he harm any of them?'

Meria revealed her teeth in a cold smile. ‘Why should he harm them when he's a child himself? They caught him making daisychains and floating them in the stream, so they dragged him into the square and whipped him.' She adjusted her bodice and stood by the huge marble fireplace, idle and listless, kicking at the dead ash.

Dagon regarded the hulking misshapen man and his hands fluttered like pale moths. ‘Why do you disobey me, Angel?' he inquired tonelessly. ‘You were told not to leave the house. This is the second time in a month you've run off. Do you seek punishment? Do you crave it? Do you want to be chained up and left in the dark for a week?'

The idiot man-child remained mute and passive. He didn't possess the faculty of speech but he could make sounds which were intelligible to those familiar with them; now he stared dumbly, the uneven set of his features – slanting brow, ill-matched eyes and gross lips – oddly pathetic in their twisted ugliness.

Dagon ben Shem Tov clicked his tongue and turned away abruptly. He said, ‘I hope for your sake the townspeople don't come pestering me about your exploits. I don't want them anywhere near the house, much less to enter it. Do you understand me, Angel? Do my words penetrate that solid bone skull of yours?'

‘Save your breath,' Meria said boredly. ‘You can't talk to an addled egg and expect a reply. He's lost what few wits he once had.'

The creature was dismissed and he lumbered away, seemingly oblivious to everything but the stinging taste of the whip. He inhabited the house like a phantom. Later in the evening, as Dagon ben Shem Tov and his daughter were dining together in the great hall, the tallow candles throwing long dancing shadows against the stone walls and high timbered ceiling, a visitor was announced. His arrival was unexpected, though Dagon ben Shem Tov showed no sign of surprise, his large eyes calm and watchful as the stranger entered and made a brief formal bow. He was a tall young man, fair-haired, with a casual manner and amiable disposition, and he apologized for intruding on their privacy. Dagon ben Shem Tov and Meria remained seated as he explained his presence.

‘I've travelled many miles to be here – as no doubt you can see from the state of my dress. I had intended to arrive at a more suitable hour but there was an incident at the border which delayed me.'

‘Then I hope your journey hasn't been wasted,' Dagon ben Shem Tov said, wiping his lips fastidiously and throwing down the napkin. ‘We're not prepared for guests, nor do we welcome them. Your name is Daneri?'

‘As I told your manservant.' For a moment the young man seemed at a loss. ‘You haven't heard of me?'

Dagon ben Shem Tov pursed his lips together but didn't otherwise respond.

‘Jorge Luis Daneri,' the young man said hopefully, as though expecting his name to mean something to them. When it apparently didn't he went on, ‘I was led to believe … I was told quite definitely that you would be expecting me. You haven't received a letter?'

‘No letter mentioning you,' Dagon ben Shem Tov said, glancing at his daughter. ‘Who is supposed to have written this mythical letter?'

‘My patron, Carlos Zungri. You know of him?'

Dagon ben Shem Tov rose to his feet. ‘You have studied with Zungri?'

‘For three years. He said that I showed promise in certain arts and practices and that if I wished to progress there was only one man in all of Europe who could instruct me. He promised to write – in fact he did write, I saw the letter – and ask if
you would accept me as an initiate. I've travelled for many weeks to be here and at last, in the great moment, I've only succeeded in showing myself to be a fool and simpleton. You must think me unworthy of even your smallest consideration.'

‘What is a lost letter between practitioners of the ancient arts?' said Dagon ben Shem Tov, stepping forward to take the young man's arm. ‘As a favoured novice of Carlos Zungri you are more than welcome.' He led him to a chair by the fire, musing softly, ‘Daneri … Daneri … I should have heard the name but it doesn't come readily to mind.' He said with a halfsmile towards Meria, ‘I haven't been keeping in touch with developments lately. Too much to occupy my mind.'

‘You are deeply involved in your work, I understand that,' said Luis Daneri gravely. He was looking at Meria for the first time; he had not so far paid her any attention. Now he watched her covertly, taking in her fresh high colour and raven-black hair, the fine curve of the neck which led the eye willingly to the softer parts of her anatomy temptingly concealed amongst filigree lace and ruffles of green velvet.

She acknowledged his look openly, not lowering her eyes as maidens were expected to do: he was an attractive man, her frank steady gaze told him so.

Dagon ben Shem Tov seated himself in the chair opposite. ‘Did Carlos happen to give you a letter of introduction?' The firelight glinted and moved in his dark eyes, winking points of light reflecting glassily.

Daneri said hastily, ‘I naturally assumed you would have received his personal letter and be expecting my arrival. Under the circumstances I can only offer my abject apologies for this intrusion. However, I would never—'

‘We are pleased to have your company,' Meria said, reaching for the decanter. ‘I speak for us both.' She poured brandy into a long-stemmed glass and brought it to him. ‘My father doesn't feel the need for companionship and tends to forget that others can grow weary of solitude; and that they might pine for the stimulus of a fresh mind.'

‘I have nothing against fresh minds,' said Dagon ben Shem Tov. ‘On the contrary – and particularly when it's someone who can converse intelligently on the subject of metaphysics. The matter is so affected by superstitious twaddle and mumbo-jumbo
that most people sit and gawp like dumbstruck imbeciles when confronted with the true way, the right path.'

‘I am still a novice,' Luis Daneri reminded him humbly. ‘My patron spoke of you as the Master Adept who was engaged on great and momentous works. If you will accept me as an initiate I ask nothing more than to sit at your feet, to listen and learn.'

Dagon ben Shem Tov looked into the flames. ‘Did Carlos specify these “great and momentous” works of mine?'

‘Not beyond saying that you had succeeded in understanding the wisdom of many centuries and had set about the task of putting it down in the form of a manuscript.'

‘That was all? Nothing else?'

The young man seemed to hesitate. ‘There have been rumours – possibly due to the foolish superstition you refer to – that you have discovered the source of all power in the universe, the godhead from which all life emanates. Of course we didn't give much credence to such reports, knowing them to be—'

He broke off suddenly. Dagon ben Shem Tov had let his head fall back and he was laughing soundlessly; it was, Daneri supposed, an expression of amusement, this dry wheezing gasp from the small open mouth. The young man licked his lips and stammered, ‘I know we shouldn't have listened to such rumours, being nothing but ill-founded speculation and gossip.'