She reached down farther in the earth and stretched her leaves upward. Her seed fell barren to the ground, and she knew that she was merely a beacon. I say that she knew, but it was not knowledge as we hold it. The green cell is the engine in plants where blue light is purely mind. And blue light is knowledge, the truth before it is warped by perception of eyes and solitary minds. Plants, and some simple animals, are best suited for holding and sharing the light.
The unity of living flesh and divine light is still more a dream than reality. The light strains to reach the flesh that stretches toward it. But they are not yet one, not even for that woody giant. To reproduce herself, then, she could only sing, waiting for a mate to come. Waiting for the moment when she reached maturity.
He approached the ancient tree with no more concern than a woodsman.
“What are you doing here?” Esther the park ranger asked Gray Man. She’d just come from around the tree and was startled by the appearance of the hobo.
Ever since the day she came awake before the great tree, covered in butterflies, with the memory of those bright blue eyes in hers, she came to visit the tree at least once a week. She came to listen to a nearly subliminal thrumming and to watch the wild animals that came in almost religious obeisance. There is magic near that tree, that’s what the ranger thought.
Gray Man ignored her question, craning his neck to see the full height of the towering column.
“Excuse me, sir, but I’m doing research in this area and it’s off-limits to visitors. If you want to see trees, you have to stay on the paths as they are marked.”
Gray Man raised his hands and laughed. Sparks leaped from his fingertips.
“What are you doing?” Esther asked in a trembling voice.
Somewhere inside the tree the trembling was echoed, though not in fear.
Gray Man’s laugh died at the challenge, and suddenly Horace came back to life. He could see what Gray Man was doing, but he had no power to stop him. He had no desire to save a dumb tree.
“Stop it!” cried Esther O’Halloran as she ran at Gray Man with a dead branch for her club.
The electrical shock was enough to shatter the branch and throw the woman down a small incline into a stream. Gray Man gazed upon her with anger that he’d not felt toward a human before. But he was upset, upset by Horace LaFontaine.
Horace looked at the woman and thought, Fool, why you wanna go messin’ ’round and gettin’ yourself kilt like that anyway? I don’t wanna see you die, but I ain’t gettin’ skinned alive again just ’cause you a fool.
The timber of the redwood groaned, and Gray Man knew that this frail being meant something to the tree. He smiled at the possibility of inflicting pain before death and turned toward the park ranger. Her eyes were rolled up into her head, but still she struggled to rise.
Horace watched with fatalistic fascination. He was less than a ghost, no more than a common cold to his demonic host, and he, in his powerlessness, didn’t feel much for the doomed woman. But then the groaning of the tree became louder and more strident. The ground began to tremble. Esther O’Halloran, who had risen upon unsteady feet, danced away while trying to keep upright.
Gray Man and Horace turned to the tree just as it exploded in a shower of splinters and bright blue light.
Horace, fully aware, felt the brunt of the explosion and then ran down a dark asphalt alley under a heavy downpour. Blue streetlights were placed at uneven intervals down the lane. He ran into walls and trash cans and old rotted fences. He fell and stumbled back to his feet, ran and collapsed, all the while followed by the silent specter of pain. It came after him like a flood of thick blood. He ran and fell tumbling right out of Gray Man’s life.
But Gray Man didn’t see Horace go. He was running himself. The splinters and timbers didn’t hurt him, but the light of the life of that tree went down to his marrow. He caught fire from the vitality and sanctity of the tree. And all he could do was run with the curse of the tree etched deeply on his soul.
Beneath the desert, at the same moment of the explosion, Winch Fargo’s door broke open. Wild-eyed and impossibly skinny, the black-toothed felon staggered up the mine shaft into the clear desert twilight. As he climbed to the surface, the sun disappeared and the stars slowly winked to life. Thousands and thousands of stars. Each one, he knew, like a flower for the honey bee gods who left him here long before there was time or love.
Winch Fargo sought her in the air. There was a trace and a direction — and many fewer steps ahead than there were years behind.
Seventeen
After two weeks Christian Bonhomme decided it was time for him to enter Claudia Zimmerman’s cell again. This was no light decision. He had put it off until the day before the inquest. The only men that had been allowed in to see her were Miles Barber and Felton Meyers, the ex-detective and the court-appointed attorney. And Felton was thoroughly searched before he was allowed into her cell. She fired Felton after their first meeting, however, and spent the next two weeks alone.
Bonhomme was not a religious man, nor did he believe in magic or voodoo or any other such nonsense. But he had seen the depraved survivors of the zombie sex camp. One man, a carpenter named Stanley Brussels, stayed on his knees begging from the time he awoke to the moment he collapsed into sleep. He had to be force-fed through a rubber tube the hospital attendants shoved down his nostril once a day. Others mutilated themselves or became so violent that they were restrained twenty-four hours a day.
Each man wanted only one thing: to see Claudia Zimmerman, to be put in a cell near hers. They begged and cajoled and threatened.
“If that’s what you call love,” he’d said to Briggs and Barber the day he was to go into Claudia’s cell, “then you can have it.”
He wasn’t the same man that Barber remembered. Outside the detention room Bonhomme stalled, clenching his pipe between visible teeth.
“Did you ask the judge for an extension?” Bonhomme asked Lonnie Briggs.
“You know I did, Chris. They said that they have to see her for the indictment as soon as she’s sitting up straight. I don’t know what’ll happen if they find out that she hasn’t seen a doctor.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Bonhomme said through his pipe. “Is Clemmens out there?”
“I told you he was.”
“Then go get him, I guess.”
When the sergeant went through the door Bonhomme was left with Barber and a guard in a special detention wing of the Sacramento jail.
“She scares you, huh?” Barber asked softly.
“Yeah. Yeah, I never felt anything like it. Nothing. It was like pure sex. I went home and my wife, she... well, she went to visit her mother after two nights with me. I was all over her. I couldn’t help myself.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know it doesn’t. I’m no sex maniac.”
“No, not that,” Barber said. “Everybody we interviewed about Zimmerman said that her effect was to make them love only her. No one in the Haight slept with anyone but her — if she allowed it.”
“What are you talking about?” Bonhomme was angry. “Some kinda hocus-pocus? I don’t think the woman has some kinda power. What happened to me was what you call suggestion. All this talk about sex and perverts brought on a sorta temporary anxiety, that’s all.”