The Horses of the Night (24 page)

“She needs your help,” he said, putting his hands into his pockets.

“Her people killed Fern.”

“That's not what happened. She runs the DeVere empire, but most of the Renman people see her as expendable. She wants your help to consolidate.”

“You're smart,” I said, remembering in that instant the conversation I had enjoyed with Stuart. One could use craft, or strength, rarely both. “I wonder if I'm as cynical as you are.”

“I would keep away from Anna,” he said.

The photographers had packed their gear. They trailed away toward an assembly of subcompacts and vans, looking like hunters mildly satisfied with the day's kill.

Rick waited for me to enter the car, but I held back. I told Rick that I wanted a private moment beside the grave, and Rick sounded almost relieved to say that he understood. This was the Stratton he could understand, serious, thoughtful, loving.

Anna Wick had beckoned to me.

We walked together under a row of cedars, my leather soles squeaking on the wet grass. “I know the people who did this,” she said.

“Why tell me?”

“They'll try again,” she said. “And this time they'll kill you.”

“I think I'll survive,” I said.

“The cops won't help, Stratton. They don't even want to.”

Rick was watching from a distance. Even from here I could sense his disapproval.

“She's just trying to set you up,” said Rick. “You better have a talk with Childress.”

We were in the back of a limousine, the day screened by the tinted glass. “I'm not that worried about it.”

Rick made an incredulous laugh. Then he grew somber. “If the doctors can't do anything to help Nona. If they can't help her.” He was thinking something he could not bring himself to say.

“Are you saying that Nona might as well be dead?”

Rick opened his hands and let them fall. “It's a thought that occurs, isn't it?”

“No, it doesn't,” I said sharply. “Not to me.”

He gave me a satisfied look, as though I had passed a test. “Let's have dinner together. I'm putting together a security team, and we can sit right there in Trader Vic's like presidential candidates and nobody will lay a finger on us.”

I told him that I couldn't.

I had plans.

36

The night was clear and it was warm.

The warmth came out of the ground, radiating upward. I walked the streets to the Great Highway, and, swept by the beams of the occasional pair of headlights, I hurried along the shoulder of the road for awhile. Then I ran across the lanes of the highway to the beach.

The beach there was broad and flat. There were a few iceplants, straggling succulents, like barbed wire gone green and slack. The plants were planted to keep the sand from blowing into dunes across the highway.

There were stars. The sand was white, littered in places with aluminum cans and scraps of charred driftwood. I made my way to the edge of the water, to the spindrift, the lowly fleece, all that is left of the surf when it has died on the shore.

There was no sign of any gift from the surf. Nothing glowed on the glistening wet sand. No voice called to me. There was only that buffeting near-deafness of the surf.

When I saw one at last I did not stoop to seize it. I waited, wondering if it was the one I sought.

It was the feather of a gull, upright in the sand right at the line where the wet sand and the dry meet. It did not glow, it did not possess a flush of color. But it was the only one, the only plume along the beach.

So at last I plucked it from the sand. It was the right size, and the point of its quill would do. I slipped it into my jacket pocket.

I hurried home, not looking at the houses I passed, not looking up at the passing men and women on the sidewalk. I could not be distracted. I could not be persuaded to take any other course.

I knew how to save Nona.

I lit a fire in my study. The room was finished now, and the new ash paneling reflected the light of the eucalyptus wood fire. From the pantry, I brought one of the cups my mother had prized, thin bone-china that was translucent and fragile. I went up to my study and returned with a large, uncut sheet of super-opaque paper and a fountain pen. I also brought down an Exacto knife, one of the razor-tipped wands I used for precise cutting.

I spread the paper on the cocktail table. I uncapped the pen. And then I could not write a single word.

This was the way to save Nona. I knew that. But I could not keep from wondering at what I was about to do. What had I come to, this night?

On the page I wrote, carefully:
My soul in exchange for power
.

I could not move.

Does it really say that? Had I written that, with this hand?

I stood. I backed away from the page, all the way to the mantle.

My hands were trembling. I could barely cap the pen. I knew that this was the end of my life as a human being. From this night on I would be something else, something like a man, but not.

At the same time, I felt absurd. This made swimming in riptides look like a dull effort indeed. I was crazy. I made a sound, an ugly, dry laugh.

My soul. What was it, after all? A thing of legend, an artifact of myth. There were no souls. There was no life beyond death, no essence within a living creature that could be described truthfully by such an ancient concept. So what I tendered was a thing that did not exist. There was no reason to be concerned for even an instant. I was cheating the Powers, whatever They might be, offering Them a currency that was worthless to me.

I was a fool. Nothing would come of this. Still—there was something sick about what I was doing, something unclean. Why? What could possibly be wrong with me?

People did worse things every night. People destroyed lives, depraved, cruel people, and never suffered a moment's conscience. Who was I to quail over this trifling deed?

And yet all the fears I had ever had about dying arose within me for a moment. Men and women dedicated whole careers to saving the soul, keeping it from endless suffering. Could I argue that not believing in the soul made this step any less serious? Perhaps. But I had the sense that I was about to do something ultimately sinful.

For Nona, I breathed. Or was it? Wasn't I interested in the other rewards that would spring from this?

I had already enjoyed a taste of the prizes They could bring me. I was shivering. Wouldn't I take my own life to win Nona back to the world of daylight? Of course I would. Then, what a cheap price my soul would prove to be.

The doctors were useless. The police powerless, or even in collusion with my enemies. I could not turn back. What was I waiting for? Didn't I want to hear the sound of Nona's voice?

I nicked the end of the quill, cutting a notch into it.

Then I lifted the sharp blade, a wedge no larger than a fingernail, before my eyes. I steadied my hand.

I cut my tongue. I let the blood from my tongue flow into the bone-china cup. The cut was deeper than I had anticipated. The blood made a chiming sound as it ran into the container, the sound growing deeper and more muted as the cup filled to one third of its capacity.

It was not too late. I could still turn back.

At first the cut had not hurt. Now it throbbed, and I found myself swallowing blood. I dipped the quill into the fluid. I squinted, making sure that the shaft of the feather was filling with the red ink.

Then I knelt over the sheet of paper, and signed my name.

I had to dip the feather into the cup twice, but when my signature was finished the final letters gleamed in the firelight, before they, too, faded to a brunette cursive.

Blood on a page, in the light of a fire, looks like tar, something originating with a living thing but far removed from it, a byproduct rather than the stuff of life.

There. Done.

And everything was fine. The firelight was bright. The cut on my tongue didn't hurt anymore. Everything was going to be as I had wanted it. All I had to do was unwrap the night like someone receiving a gift.

And take what was mine.

37

I had never felt so alive.

I ran without tiring, with the steady stride of a marathon runner. There were almost no people out this late, and little traffic, but the streets were alive, the glistening reflections of bedrooms and stoplights pulsing in my sight.

For long periods I was aware of nothing but a sweet flavor in my mouth, and then I would wake to full consciousness and find myself, unexpectedly, in a garden, observing the slumbering carp, or in an alcove, aware of the drowse and murmur of sleepers above, around me.

I could taste the lives around me, as thoroughly as I could have tasted the smoke of a fine cigar, rolled it on my tongue, inhaled, and breathed it out again, enriched and poisoned.

It is in the closed places, the rooms, the hidden courtyards that we will never visit, that life takes place. The act of passion, the bribe, all begin the changes that will construct the life the streets can only deliver to be unpacked.

Listen, we say, pausing under a window. Someone is making love, or urging an infant to sleep again. Life possesses itself, complete, private, the wellhead sealed with the potted geranium, the stone saint staring into the crypt. It is a marvel.

And it is mortal. The people around me were distinct and comprehended, books I had read. I hurried, unaware of my footfalls, slipping from door to street to shadow. My clothing, my damp human garb, clung to me, the remnants of a life I was already forgetting.

Streets passed beneath me as I ran. “I see how beautiful it is,” I breathed.

I had spent my soul, and a new life had been given to me.

The Medical Center was a blaze of fluorescent lights. There was activity there, in contrast to the sleep of the rest of the buildings I had seen. One ambulance backed up, and the rear doors were flung open. Another approached, red light lashing the dark.

Once I associated this sort of emergency with myself, feeling that I, too, could have an accident, suffer, lose my life. When I was inside the hospital I glided past the desk, and the two women holding conversation there did not even stir to look in my direction because I willed them deaf to my presence.

An elevator would be too slow. I pounded up the stairs. I reached the room where Nona had slept, and hurried into it, aware that the chamber was too dark, devoid any sign of her. The room was empty.

She was gone.

An adjoining room held a man wide awake, staring into the half-dark. Another room was occupied by a gray-haired woman whose hands fidgeted on the coverlet. I plunged past room after room.

“What have they done with Dr. Lyle?” My voice was as calm as I could make it, but it still ripped the silence of the nurses' station, a small domain of clipboards and scratch pads provided by the manufacturers of painkillers.

The nurse there considered me, and then, after she had finished thinking, continued to look at me blankly while her hand reached for the telephone. “Dr. Lyle?” she responded, stalling. “When was she admitted?”

I leaned over the counter. “Where have they taken her?”

The sound of my voice made her snatch at the telephone, and miss. The other hand clung to a ballpoint pen, one of those cheap, black, institutional implements. “I'll have to check her file.”

“Do,” I purred, all courtesy and implied—but barely implied—impatience. For some reason she was not charmed by me. My tone did not strike her as well-mannered. I smiled, and she picked up the telephone.

I reached over the counter and took the receiver very gently from her hand. “It won't be too much trouble, will it, if you look through those files there beside you?”

“I'm not sure that I can help you—”

“I believe you can,” I said, with a smile that made her drop her pen.

She searched, hurriedly. “I don't see it here, sir. If you would just let me make a call or two—”

Crush her, I thought. How dare she stand in my way?

Something about my eyes made her give me a fake, painful smile. “Please,” she began. “Maybe someone from security can help you.”

I had a struggle, within myself, for a rational thought.
Make her tell me. Make her find out, without alerting anyone
.

The nurse took a sharp breath, like someone pricked. There was a long moment. Then she picked up the phone and punched numbers.

At last she hung up and turned to me, her eyes bright with good cheer. “She's been taken to the Omega wing,” she said.

The corridors had never seemed so narrow. The hospital had never seemed so jammed with trolleys of soiled laundry, with empty gurneys, with wheelchairs lined up against walls.

Omega wing was locked. I entered a side door, through a passageway of crisp, fresh white uniforms on shelves, dodged past a stack of boxes, and entered a hallway of muted light.

There was none of that sense of abandoned bustle here. There was nothing that reminded one of the fretful promise of most hospital wings. This place was badly lit, and the nurses' station was unattended.

I had never realized how artificial the air of a hospital is, how empty of living fragrance.

Nona was curled in her sleep. There was a glaze of perspiration on her forehead. She was breathing, very slowly. As before, her hands were curled into fists as I looked down upon her, this concourse of fluids, this woman dead to life.

The only light came from the red numerals in the medical equipment, and a gray glow from the hallway.

“Nona,” I whispered. “Wake up and speak to me.”

The power was in my touch, and I felt my fingers hum as I touched her face. “Wake up, Nona, and be with me.”

Nona slept, and I could feel the dumb weight of her, the slung-down bulk of her flesh and bones, her stricken-animal stupor.

“Nona,” I cried in a loud voice. “Nona, I want you to live!”

Make her live
, I cried in my thoughts.