Evil… there was a primeval oldness in the word, inevitable and eternal like the dawn-musk of swamps… Evil…
And there’s an oldness in Benedict Howards, she thought, a sick evil oldness as if he’s living his life backward, as if the shadow of a million-year future of power-fear-sweat-stinking madness has already made him something not-human, dead in ways no man’s ever been dead before, dead from a million years of hoarded, fermented oldness, a withered vampire living on blood like a frightened cancer, dead but undying.
Immortality.
“Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.” A grotesque vision of green plastic swam before her eyes, a kit-model she had seen in some Berkeley apartment geological ages ago—a comic-hideous, slime-dripping, cross-eyed disaster of a green plastic giant frog, sitting on a green plastic lily-pad from a Walt Disney swamp with tiny dwarf-frogs beside it leaping like frantic tadpoles at the placard the frog-monster held aloft, proclaiming: “Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.”
And the frog-face began to change as the surf sounds poured over it like a great black tide of evil. The comic cross-eyes became lizard-eyes, cold, black and reptilian, the eyes of Benedict Howards; and the goofy grin became a crocodile-leer, a sharp, bone-white lizardman smile, hungry, totally ruthless and totally knowing. The figures leaping up in worship at the placard were green plastic human beings in a great thronging crowd, a pile of live writhing bodies pillaring to the sky, fighting each other to leap eagerly through the great crocodile-jaws that chewed them to green plastic frog-flesh pieces, green slime fluid drooling past the bone-white teeth, and, above it all, way above it all, holding his placard like a scepter against the shattered sky, black lizard-eyes gaping like holes into the final darkness, Benedict Howards, his crocodile-mouth a vast cavern, and a river of human beings pouring down it, leaping like flames at the sly, knowing sign they worshipped: “Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.”
The sign of immortality.
That, she thought, that’s Howards’ immortality. And oh, oh, have we kissed the frog, with his wet green lips like pulsing gland tissue; lizard-lips running all over our bodies like a dirty old pervert; inside, outside, kissing, sucking, drooling baby-blood spit, green monster-slime of immortality…
She shuddered, trying to throw off the vision, stared through the glass doors at the darkening sky over the city as the surfsounds flowed around her like the eternal moaning of everything everywhere struggling in grim mortal anguish as blue and green sinuous color organ shadows played at the corners of her vision like a sea of frog-green tentacles—and abruptly the interface between the green swamp-reality of miasmic evil engulfing her and the flat mural-reality of the cityscape beyond the glass doors inverted, and she was no longer on the inside looking out but on the outside looking in.
The undulating blue-green light writhing behind her like a forest of tentacles the roar of the surf like the sigh of some great beached and expiring sea animal, seemed to press against the glass reality-interface like a bubble being forced up by decay-gas pressure from the depths of an oily green swamp pool. She felt the weight, the pressure of the whole room pushing behind her as if the blind green monsters that lurked in the most unknowable pits in the ass-end of her mind were bubbling up from the depths and elbowing her consciousness out of her skull.
She moaned, pressed against the glass, keyed the door-switch frantically; but when the doors finally slid open, she found herself caught in the reality-interface itself: the bile-green mists of madness the surfsound sucking behind her becoming an unreal nightmare she now knew was just an acid bummer; but before her, the moist wind from the dark million-light city seemed to be blowing in off a sea-coast jungle that felt as if it might go on forever. Realer than real, there was a vacuum out there, a hole opening on to infinity into which she could fall up and up forever, up and up and up till she might drown in the sea of herself and be lost forever.
Yet she felt the siren-song of that bottomless nothingness calling to her, calling, promising… and she had to look, had to walk the shore of that infinite black sea—and she stepped out on to the patio.
And again reality went through changes.
It was like stepping out into a Tibetan monastery perched atop some ascetic mountain. She felt the interface between her personality and the Universe take a quantum-jump outward, as if an inner telescope had suddenly switched over to a higher power. As she stepped through the doorway she felt the ceiling explode away in shards, like a satellite-shield ejecting, leaving her naked to the bare black marches of infinity that began at the edges of her being and ballooned outward forever.
And far below her, a shimmering arabesque carpet of lights and street sounds, the electric city coruscated like a continuous sheet of incandescent protoplasm, rippling in kinesthop patterns from Brooklyn glowing on the horizon to the base of the concrete mountain on which she stood like a remote eye tipping the pseudopod of a continent-wide human amoeba contemplating its own piebald vastness.
With the surfsound tape sighing behind her, Sara walked to the parapet, leaned over, and it seemed as if she stood on the interface, was the interface between that living, human, upward-reaching organism of lights and the black depths of infinity that yawned above her.
Immortality—was electric-light slime reaching for the stars, and she stood poised on the brink, balanced on the razor-edge between life and death, the flickering and the eternal, the human and the immortal, sanity and the holy madness that was realer than sanity, more cogent, a path to oneness with the timeless infinity that could be hers if she had the courage to cast off her moorings to the shores of self and trust her fate to that all-forgiving sea.
She half-turned as if to look behind her, and the blue-green sinuousness of the sighing chamber inside was a foul mocking reminder of the slime-things dripping stolen secretions of dead children within her that had brought her to this dark place.
And now the surfsound seemed to be coming from below her like a vast invisible sea, its breakers cresting against the concrete parapet against which she found herself leaning vertiginously, calling to her with the wordless voice of forever to cast herself upon its buoying waters and be carried away… away… Away from the mocking lizard-face of Benedict Howards, with his cold reptilian eyes leering out at her from bone-white lair of death… Away even, it promised, from the monstrosities oozing murder… within her… away… away… away…
On a stone pedestal a few yards from her, rested an extension vidphone. The dead gray screen seemed to leap out at her. Jack! Jack! Oh, Jack…
JACK JACK JACK… The shape of his name was a hard-edged shimmer before her, and she found her hand dialing his office vidphone number. JACK JACK JACK…
“Sara…” Jack’s face was a tiny moon of bone-white phosphor on the vidphone screen. “What the hell is it, you know I’m going on the air in half an hour.”
Even on the tiny soft-focus vidphone screen, his wild curling hair and those deep inward eyes crackled phosphorescent electricity into the darkness around her.
“What are you going to do on the show tonight?” she asked. But the she that said the words seemed to be existing a beat ahead of her in time, and Sara knew what she was saying only after the words had left her mouth.
“Come on, baby, you know damn well what the score is,” Jack said. “Bennie Howards calls the shots tonight.”
“You can’t do it,” she found herself saying, and again it was as if the pressures of the words were molding her tongue and lips and cheeks into the necessary configurations—she wasn’t saying them, they were saying themselves. “You’ve got to stop Howards. No matter what it costs, you’ve got to stop him.”